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Multimodal interaction with W3C standards : toward natural user interfaces to everything
Dahl D., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2016. 422 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319428-14-7)
Date Reviewed: Jan 2 2018

With computing machinery (for example, the Internet of Things [1] and virtual reality [2]) rapidly penetrating the consumer market, human-computer interaction (HCI) is rapidly becoming an outdated paradigm and human-media interaction or interaction technology seems more accurate. Media in a multitude of shapes and appearances, utilizing multiple modalities via natural user interfaces [3], enable instinctive computing [4], that is, the intuitive interaction between artificial and natural intelligence. Like communication, interaction requires solid standards and protocols. For telecommunication, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is in charge of this; for web-based applications, it is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). As such, this book is of potentially critical importance.

The book starts with an introduction to either refresh the reader’s memory or give a gentle introduction to the book’s field. This includes a brief overview of several standards, the most noteworthy being Extensible Multimodal Annotation (EMMA), of which we will read more throughout the book. Starting with chapter 1, the W3C’s multimodal architecture is introduced, which originates from the W3C work groups on voice browsers and multimodal interaction. Chapter 2 discusses speech standards, with which W3C efforts on multimodality started. These standards are introduced via a brief journey through time, where we meet EMMA again. Subsequently, a quick tour of W3C’s voice-based work group’s major standards is provided. The next three chapters are each devoted to a specific standard markup language (ML), namely: EMMA, EmotionML, and State Chart Extensible Markup Language (SCXML).

Chapter 6 deviates from the previous chapters, and from most of the book actually, as it does not discuss W3C standards, but rather an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard on dialogue act annotation. The chapter provides an in-depth background analysis on this ISO standard and links it to the non-W3C Dialogue Act Markup Language (DiAML) standard. The two subsequent chapters provide examples of W3C standards followed by implementations (section 2), applications (section 3), and future directions (section 4), including raw ML code snippets, some consuming multiple pages. And, of course, EMMA returns from time to time.

Taken together, the reader is provided with an overview of W3C standards on multimodal interaction and use cases to illustrate their use. As such, this book can be a good starter for those unfamiliar with the W3C standards on multimodality. However, for such readers, a structured review of these specific standards in relation to both the broad set of W3C standards and standards from other bodies (for example, ISO and ITU) should also have been in place, but it is absent. Moreover, the majority of the book’s content is devoted to examples, and I am not sure whether many of them are representative of the vast body of implementations and applications available.

The reader should be aware that W3C is not the only organization providing standards for multimodal interaction. An ISO standard is discussed; however, IEEE and the ITU also define relevant standards. That being said, W3C is the organization for web-based standards. However, with the rise of the Internet of Things, the question is whether or not natural user interfaces will be web-based, and consequently whether or not EMMA will be the name used most worldwide in the near future.

Reviewer:  Egon L. van den Broek Review #: CR145740 (1803-0131)
1) Hersent, O.; Boswarthick, D.; Elloumi, O. The Internet of Things: key applications and protocols. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chichester, West Sussex, UK, 2012.
2) Jerald, J. The VR book: human-centered design for virtual reality. Morgan & Claypool Publishers/ACM, New York, NY, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1145/2792790.
3) Wigdor, D.; Wixon, D. Brave NUI world: designing natural user interfaces for touch and gesture. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers/Elsevier, Inc., Burlington, MA, 2011.
4) Yang, C. Instinctive computing. Springer, London, UK, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-7278-9.
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