Requirements for Automatically Generating Multi-Modal Interfaces for Complex Appliances

Several industrial and academic research groups are working to simplify the control of appliances and services by creating a truly universal remote control. Unlike the preprogrammed remote controls available today, these new controllers download a specification from the appliance or service and use it to automatically generate a remote control interface. This promises to be a useful approach because the specification can be made detailed enough to generate both speech and graphical interfaces. Unfortunately, generating good user interfaces can be difficult. Based on user studies and prototype implementations, this paper presents a set of requirements that we have found are needed for automatic interface generation systems to create high-quality user interfaces.