Marvina – A Norwegian Speech Centric, Multimodal Visitors’ Guide

This paper describes the development and testing of a multimodal visitors’ guide service for guests to the city and university in Trondheim. The system is under continuous development. At the present state it serves as a help for visitors to Trondheim aiming at meeting people at the university. Using a natural speech interface with a mobile phone it provides help in finding the right bus connection, how to find your way on the campus, and finally how to find the office inside the building where you are going to meet. In-formation is provided to the user in the form of speech and graphics (maps, illustrations). It is also illustrated how a robot-guide can be used in helping the visitor in finding his way inside a building. Presently, the user end of the demonstrator is implemented on a standard PC, using IP-based telephony (Skype Out). However, in order to utilize all aspects of the system, a practical implementation would re-quire a type of PDA-based phone.