The WAMI toolkit for developing, deploying, and evaluating web-accessible multimodal interfaces

Many compelling multimodal prototypes have been developed which pair spoken input and output with a graphical user interface, yet it has often proved difficult to make them available to a large audience. This unfortunate reality limits the degree to which authentic user interactions with such systems can be collected and subsequently analyzed. We present the WAMI toolkit, which alleviates this difficulty by providing a framework for developing, deploying, and evaluating Web-Accessible Multimodal Interfaces in which users interact using speech, mouse, pen, and/or touch. The toolkit makes use of modern web-programming techniques, enabling the development of browser-based applications which rival the quality of traditional native interfaces, yet are available on a wide array of Internet-connected devices. We will showcase several sophisticated multimodal applications developed and deployed using the toolkit, which are available via desktop, laptop, and tablet PCs, as well as via several mobile devices. In addition, we will discuss resources provided by the toolkit for collecting, transcribing, and annotating usage data from multimodal user interactions.