The present invention relates to access and rendering of information in a computer system. More particularly, the present invention relates to sequential multimodal input for a second generation (“2.5G”) mobile or cellular phone.
Small computing devices such as personal information managers (PIM), devices and portable phones are used with ever increasing frequency by people in their day-to-day activities. With the increase in processing power now available for microprocessors used to run these devices, the functionality of these devices are increasing, and in some cases, merging. For instance, many portable phones, and in particular, a 2.5G phone, now can be used to access and browse the Internet as well as can be used to store personal information such as addresses, phone numbers and the like.
In view that these computing devices are being used for browsing the Internet, or are used in other server/client architectures, it is therefore necessary to enter information into the computing device. Unfortunately, due to the desire to keep these devices as small as possible in order that they are easily carried, conventional keyboards having all the letters of the alphabet as isolated buttons are usually not possible due to the limited surface area available on the housings of the computing devices. Thus, in order to navigate a client/server architecture such as the Internet, the user of such a device must manipulate the limited keyboard in a manner to provide textual information to fill required fields for a web page or otherwise provide instructions. Although a 2.5G phone includes additional modalities for the input of data such as use of a touch sensitive screen that enables a small alphanumeric keyboard to be rendered and used to input data through a stylus over the earlier “2.5G” phone that only used the limited 12 button keypad, a user still must manually select the characters in order to fill in textboxes and the like on a given web page. This manner of input still can be quite slow and thereby inhibit the user's ability to provide or receive information.
Recently, voice portals such as through the use of SALT (Speech Application Language Tags) VoiceXML (voice extensible markup language) have been advanced to allow Internet content to be accessed using only a telephone. In this architecture, a document server (for example, a web server) processes requests from a client through a SALT/VoiceXML interpreter. The web server can produce SALT/VoiceXML documents in reply, which are processed by the SALT/VoiceXML interpreter and rendered audibly to the user. Using voice commands through voice recognition, the user can navigate the web. This technique of Internet navigation also is limiting, particularly, when information obtained from the web server is rendered back to the user since it must be rendered audibly. In addition, without visual confirmation of recognized results, the user may not be assured proper recognition has occurred. Although audible confirmations of recognized results can be provided, such confirmations take time and thereby detract from a streamlined or efficient user experience.
There is thus an ongoing need to improve upon the architecture and methods used to access information in a server/client architecture, and in particularly, access to server information for a device such as a 2.5G phone.