Flexible Audio Streams

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.