Computertalk and Multimodality

Besides the continuing activities of the last 25 years in constructing natural language interfaces by simulating the human natural language capacities on machines and the upcoming of its “natural” alternative at the beginning of the eighties, the graphical interfaces, a lot of recent research activities in computer science, artificial intelligence and information science center around multimodal computer systems. Mixed modalities (e.g. text and graphics) are one of the most favored ideas nowadays in spite of the fact that the area is still in its formative stage (cf. Maybury 1991 as an overview).