Mobile Intelligence

20.1 INTRODUCTION

In the last two decades, two technological innovations have proved to provide a very significant impact on our everyday lives and habits. The first innovation, the Internet, provides new means and ways to access the vast amounts of information and an exploding number of online services available today. The Internet has revolutionized the way people communicate with each other, how they receive news, shop, and conduct other day-to-day activities. The second innovation, a mobile phone, provides users with a simple anytime and anywhere communication tool. Originally designed for interpersonal communication, today mobile phones are capable of connecting their users to a wide variety of Internet-enabled services and applications, which can vary from a simplified Web browser to a GPS-enabled navigation system. Researchers and practitioners agree that a combination of these two innovations (online Internet-enabled services that can be accessed via a mobile phone) should have a revolutionary impact on mobile commerce [1,3,5,9,20]. So far, current research has been focusing mostly on mobile applications designed for smart phones, in which the application logic is usually placed within the mobile device. Speech, however, remains the most basic and the most efficient form of communication, and providing a form of speech-based communication remains the prevalent function of any mobile phone. Given these two facts, mobile applications with a voice-based interface for accessing ...