Enabling rapid development of multimodal data entry applications

Evaluations of mobile multimodal applications are frequently conducted in the laboratory which allows recreating the intended usage context, whilst tightly controlling and monitoring the testing environment and tasks performed. For this type of technology evaluations, in order to speed up the development process for speech-enabled multimodal applications, we developed a multimodal authoring tool. This rapid prototyping tool allows us to quickly produce a proof of concept multimodal data entry application that we can utilize to evaluate the feasibility and usability of using speech in a particular usage context, e.g. on the construction field, for municipal inspections, for gaming applications, etc. Our tool makes the development of a simple multimodal data entry prototype application easy even for a novice user. This paper describes design considerations for the multimodal prototyping tool and elaborates on our experience working with the tool.