Webgalaxy - integrating spoken language and hypertext navigation

The growth in the quantity of information and services offered online has been phenomenal. Nevertheless, access mechanisms have remained relatively primitive, requiring users to primarily point and click their way through a forest of Web links and to expend valuable cognitive capacities to track the geography of the Web space. Conversational systems can provide an intuitive, flexible multi-modal interface to online resources. The explosive growth of the World Wide Web, the continuing standardization of Web related technologies, and the growing penetration of Internet access enable us to embed a very thin client inside a standard Web browser, making conversational interfaces available to a much wider audience. This paper presents WebGALAXY, a conversational spoken language system for access to selected online resources from within a typical browser. A thin Java based client is employed as the front end with much of the speech and natural language processing occuring on remote servers.