Flexible Audio Streams

TL;DR

This paper presents a multimodal portal application that efficiently creates an audio browser for RSS/Atom feeds, enabling voice and graphical interaction for diverse digital content access.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, efficient system for audio browsing of RSS/Atom streams with multimodal interaction and secure access, improving accessibility and usability.

Findings

System effectively supports voice and graphic commands

Enables access to secure personal content

Suitable for visually impaired and mobile users

Abstract

Tremendous research effort was invested in audio browsers and machine learning techniques to decode the structure of Web pages in order to put them into an audio format. In this paper, we address a simpler and efficient solution for the creation of an audio browser of VOICEXML generated from RSS/Atom stream feeds. We developed a multimodal (audio and graphical) portal application that offers RSS/Atom feeds. By utilizing sing our system, the user can interact using voice or graphic commands, listen and watch digital content, such as news, blogs feeds, podcasts, and even access email and personal schedules. The portal system permits the use of security credentials (user/password authentication) to collect secure RSS/Atom stream in the multimodal browser to connect the user to specific personal services. A series experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the RSS reader and navigator. Our system is extremely beneficial for a wide range of applications, from interfaces for the visual impaired users to browsers for mobile telephonic interfaces.