MultiMedia Browser (MMB)

Current well-known web browsers are limited to Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) that are geared towards an iconic or hieroglyphic system of communication. Modern speech-enabled user interfaces are built over GUIs and apply a “Say What You See” (SWYS) paradigm. Other quasi-natural web browsers that use traditional natural language processing (NLP) techniques limit the number of web pages the user can visit. GUIs, SWYS, and NLP fail to satisfy the user's need for natural language multimedia interfaces. The MultiMedia Browser (MMB) provides a quasi-natural language seamless interface to the word wide web and the operating system. MMB has speech recognition capabilities and includes a complete web browser with advanced page navigation. MMB applies a What You Say Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) paradigm. MMB is not just an add-on to existing web browsers, but introduces an innovative and natural way of web browsing by combining the Associative Calculus Environment (ACE) and the Dynamic Hierarchal Limited Vocabulary (DHLV). The Associative Calculus is a set of rules that specifies how sentences using the ACE syntax are to be interpreted relative to graphical displays. DHLV improves speech recognition by dynamically minimizing the contents of the vocabulary pool depending on the current multimedia configuration. MMB provides the ability to navigate within a web page by utilizing Intra-page Navigation, or the Page, and Associative Features. The Associative History allows the user to revisit web pages. MMB also has the ability to handle multiple users simultaneously.