Using vision and voice to create a multimodal interface for Microsoft Word 2007

There has recently been a call to move away from the standard WIMP type of interfaces and give users access to more intuitive interaction techniques. Therefore, it in order to test the usability of a multimodal interface in Word 2007, the most popular word processor, the additional modalities of eye gaze and speech recognition were added within Word 2007 as interaction techniques. This paper discusses the developed application and the way in which the interaction techniques are included within the well-established environment of Word 2007. The additional interaction techniques are fully customizable and can be used in isolation or in combination. Eye gaze can be used with dwell time, look and shoot or blinking and speech recognition can be used for dictation and verbal commands for both formatting purposes and navigation through a document. Additionally, the look and shoot method can also be combined with a verbal command to facilitate a completely hands-free interaction. Magnification of the interface is also provided to improve accuracy and multiple onscreen keyboards are provided to provide hands free typing capabilities.