A tool for interactive advice on the use of speech in multimodal systems

With the recent spread of speech technologies and the increasing availability of application program interfaces for speech synthesis and recognition, system designers are starting to consider whether to add speech functionality to their applications. The questions that ensue are by no means trivial. SMALTO, the tool described below, provides advice on the use of speech input and/or output modalities in combinations with other modalities in the design of multimodal systems. SMALTO (Speech Modality AuxiLiary TOol), implements a theory of modalities and incorporates structured data extracted from a corpus of claims speech functionality found in recent literature on multimodality. The current version of the system aims mainly at supporting decisions at early design stages, as a hypertext system. However, further uses of SMALTO as part of a complete domain-oriented design environment are also envisaged.