The live demonstration will begin much like the recorded demonstration: We will illustrate the utility of the speakable hotlist by quickly accessing an interesting page by voice. We will then navigate from there by speaking one of the links on that page and subsequent pages. Again using the speakable hotlist, we will visit a smart page to illustrate the power of associating a spoken language with a page.
Table 1
includes some sample speakable hotlist
queries to try. They illustrate several points about the speakable
hotlist: users can define any language they choose to access a URL,
these languages can contain a wide variety of syntactic variation, and
this variety often makes items in the speakable hotlist easier to
remember when compared with
the single title approach. In all cases, using the speakable hotlist
proves faster and more convenient than the regular hotlist. We can
discover more items to try in the speakable hotlist by speaking the
query ``Show me my
speakable hotlist''. The speakable hotlist defines this query using
the following grammar in Backus-Naur form (BNF) and the
`url' predicate to associate the URL with the grammar:
start(speakable_hotlist).
url("file://localhost/$SAM_HOTLIST").
speakable_hotlist --->
[bring up | go to | (give | show) me]
[the | my] speakable hotlist.
Table 1.
Sets of Sample Speakable Hotlist Sentences, the Related URL, and the URL title.
To illustrate the flexible vocabulary of the system, we will take page requests from the audience (assuming an Internet connection). Our system is not a dictation system, so for most requests we will begin by typing the requested URL. Once we reach the page, however, we can speak any of the links and the links on subsequent pages. In the unlikely event that no one requests a page, we can ``Bring up the Yahoo Yellow Pages'' and surf from there. The following sentences represent one such sequence from that page (ignoring intermediate ``scroll down'' commands to the browser):
`WWW' in many ways (e.g., ``W W W'' and ``triple
W'') and we can stop speaking after N words (default 3) for long
links. The system therefore lets us say ``triple W personal
computing'' to select the link. In the final link, we can simply say
``prehistoric computers'' since bracketed text becomes optional. The
system supports many other tokenization rules to simplify link
speaking.
To illustrate the speaker-independence and continuous speech aspects of the system we will pass the microphone to willing participants. We will also entertain additions and modifications to the speakable hotlist to illustrate the ease of customizing this important aspect of the interface. To add a URL to the speakable hotlist, we simply visit the page and say ``Add this page to my speakable hotlist''. This adds the title of the page as the default grammar and automatically associates that grammar with the URL. Speaking the phrase ``Edit the speakable hotlist'' allows us to manually add more syntactic flexibility in retrieving the page by voice.
As time permits, we will build a smart page of interest to the audience. It is straightforward to write a grammar and associate it with a page, but deciding what it should do in response to a query requires some thought on the part of the page designer. The following very simple, self-contained smart page and associated grammar might serve as a starting point. It supports commands such as ``Show me the home page for T I''. To install it, place the shell script in the cgi-bin directory and the grammar in the docs/grammars subdirectory. The full paper describes the smart page mechanism in detail [Paper95].
#!/bin/sh
if [ $# = 0 ]; then # produce HTML
echo Content-type: text/html; echo
cat << PAGE
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>Home Pages</title>
<LINK REL="X-GRAMMAR" # a smart page!
HREF="/grammars/homepages.cfg">
</HEAD><BODY>
Ask for home pages. For further help,
<A HREF="/grammars/homepages.cfg">
look at the smart page grammar.
</A>
</BODY></HTML>
PAGE
else # interpret recognized sentence
case "$*" in
*Texas*) URL="http://www.ti.com/" ;;
*T\ I*) URL="http://www.ti.com/" ;;
*Sun*) URL="http://www.sun.com/" ;;
esac
echo "Location: $URL"; echo
fi
start(home_pages). home_pages ---> (give | show) [me] the home page for CO_NAME. CO_NAME ---> Texas Instruments | T I | Sun [Microsystems].