Inspired by earlier works on multimodal interfaces (e.g., Bolt, 1980;Cohen el al., 1996;Wahlster, 1991;Zancanaro et al., 1997), we are currently building an intelligent infrastructure, called Responsive Information Architect (RIA) to aid users in their information-seeking process.
rIA engages users in a full-fledged multimodal conversation, where users can interact with rIA through multiple modalities (speech, text, and gesture), and rIA can act/react through automated multimedia generation (speech and graphics) (Zhou and Pan 2001).