A Multimodal System for Accessing Driving Directions

The focus of this paper is describing a system that repurposes a web document by a spoken language interface to provide both visual and audio driving directions. The spoken dialog interface is used to obtain the source and destination addresses from a user. The web document retrieved by querying the user on the addresses is parsed to extract the maps and the associated text. Further the system automatically generates two sets of web documents. One of these sets is used to render the maps on a hand-held device and the other set is used for the spoken dialog interface through a traditional phone. The system’s user interface allows navigation both through speech and pen stylus input. The system is built on a PhoneBrowser architecture that allows the user to browse the web by speech control over an ordinary telephone.