Multimedia nomadic services on today's hardware

Abstract

Describes nomadic computing services built with currently available hardware and used on a daily basis by a small community of users. This environment consists of applications accessing pagers, facsimile, answering machines, telephone lines, speech synthesis, and digital recording and playback. Its key contributions are the integration of multiple media into a cohesive nomadic information infrastructure and a graceful transition from desktop to nomadic locales. This integration is at the service and user interface levels; the point of the article is that one can successfully prototype a suite of multimedia nomadic services by cobbling together applications, shellscripts, and disparate hardware components. The nomadic services make strong use of speech to provide remote access over ordinary telephone lines to a suitable set of tasks that users normally perform at the desktop. The authors place particular emphasis on communication, spanning voice as well as text and facsimile messaging. In addition these services provide personal information management, remote database access, and short-term information caching. The link between nomadic and desktop computing also changes office applications-nomadic services utilize demanding new media and 24-hour access changes how subscribers use and rely on traditional desktop databases.