WebGALAXY: Beyond Point and Click - a Conversational Interface to a Browser

Abstract This paper presents WebGALAXY, a flexible multi-modal user interface system that allows wide access to selected information on the World Wide Web (WWW) by integrating spoken and typed natural language queries and hypertext navigation. WebALAXY extends our GALAXY spoken language system, a distributed client-server system for retrieving information from online sources through speech and natural language. WebGALAXY supports a spoken user interface via a standard telephone line as well as a graphical user interface via a standard Web browser using either Java/JavaScript or a cgi-bin/forms front end. Natural language understanding is performed by the system and information servers retrieve the requested information from various online resources including WWW servers, Gopher servers and CompuServe. Currently, queries about three domains are supported: weather, air travel, and points of interest around Boston.