Nov. 8, 2009 (The Hindu Business Line) --

Prasenjit Dey

If a computer is an advanced machine, it should be able to understand our way of communication instead of demanding that we change ourselves!

These are some of the questions computer scientists are asking as information technology becomes an integral part of our daily personal and business lives.

As computers become indispensable, it is important to make sure that no one is disadvantaged by the fact that they do not know how to interact with a computer.

This can only happen when interaction with computers becomes as natural as interacting with another human being. For this to become possible, computers must understand the means by which humans interact, such as speech, gestures and facial expressions.

Anthropological studies have shown that in human-to-human interaction, speech, gestures and facial expressions are produced as part of a single process and should be regarded as such.
Multimodal systems

In human-computer-interaction (HCI), the systems that attempt to understand and/or produce multiple such natural modalities as speech, hand gestures and facial expressions are referred to as “multimodal” systems. Enabling the unified understanding of different aspects of human interaction for HCI can lead to the widespread usage and acceptance of computing systems in the future.

Multimodal systems can help surmount the barriers of computer-illiteracy and the complexity of computing interfaces in both developing and technologically advanced societies, and thus bridge the digital divide and bring computing to one and all.

Since the time of the invention of computers, the keyboard and mouse have remained the de facto mechanisms for interaction with the computer. In the early years, the use of computers was limited to a group of educated, trained people who used them for productivity and data crunching, among others. However, the times have changed and computers touch our everyday lives in ways never imagined before.

The tasks performed on the computer are much more varied and very different from what was done before. These include entertainment, communication, information seeking and e-governance. These tasks are mostly social, i.e. done with friends and family members, and are momentary and transactional in nature. Though they involve very little data entry, a lot of short interactions happen to manipulate the information or media.

This new paradigm of usage calls for a new paradigm for interaction with the computer. The computer should easily integrate in people’s everyday use and cease to be a barrier to the real task at hand.