In the new world of open, mobile communications, oftentimes, the user’s location is unknown. This presentation covers some of the new carrier network location capabilities and geospatial call routing. Speech and text can be combined with location to deliver a richer, more relevant user experience. In addition, using multimedia messaging, phone callers can receive maps, pictures, and videos that enhance the user experience.

Many mobile devices now allow complex combinations of input and output modalities, so multimodal UI developers now have a greater responsibility to design interfaces that feel natural to people in spite of higher  complexity. AT&T Research shows that successful multimodal systems account for the communicative process of “grounding,” through which users incrementally provide evidence of the context of an interaction. This talk discusses the design challenges to learning how users’ spoken interactions, spatial movements, and touch gestures on a map contributed to our understanding of grounding’s critical role in the success of a multimodal search interface.