TABLE OF CONTENTS Frank Teuteberg and Iouri Loutchko
Abstract. The popularity of wireless devices stimulates widespread efforts to develop voice and mobile user interfaces for software systems in general and for e-marketplaces in particular. This paper focuses on conceptual foundations and the architecture of an agent-based job e-marketplace supporting mobile negotiations. The negotiation model is based on many negotiation issues, a fuzzy utility scoring method, and simultaneous negotiation with many negotiation partners in an environment of limited negotiation time. The design and implementation of voice and mobile user interfaces for accessing information on an e-marketplace called FuzzyMAN (Fuzzy Multi-Agent Negotiations) is described. A comparison of technologies for the development of voice and mobile user interfaces is given.
Keywords: software agents, e-marketplace, mobile negotiations, multimodal user interfaces, VoiceXML, J2ME, XHTML, XSLT.
Recent advances in digital speech processing technologies and standards such as SALT (Speech Application Language Tags) [1] and VoiceXML (Voice Extensible Markup Language) [2] enable developers to enhance mobile applications with voice user interfaces to interact with e-marketplaces and other applications.
Mobile and especially voice-based access to e-marketplaces has several advantages in comparison to web-based access. Voice user interfaces enable users to directly access information via spoken commands instead of browsing through several drop down menus before coming to the desired information. Furthermore, handicapped persons (e.g. blind persons) who are unable to access e-marketplaces due to physical disabilities may gain access through voice-enabled mobile devices. The mobile and voice user interfaces described in this paper...
