W3C Contact: Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>
The PhoneBrowser is a system for browsing the World Wide Web using only a telephone as the terminal.Different synthesized voices are used to signify particularly interesting text on the page, most notably hyperlink titles. Other fonts like bold text or heading text, for example, may also have special voices assigned. The HyperVoice description of page layout includes information about images, forms, tables, etc. To the extent possible information about the content of the page is summarized and transformed into a concise verbal form without heavy reliance on special programming.
At any time the user can ask questions to get greater detail or can speak Hyperlink titles into a speech recognizer, interrupting TTS output, to navigate to other Web pages. Other speech commands can control operation of the browser and how the information is rendered. In this way the user has control over the presentation and navigation processes. Thus, the PhoneBrowser makes the Web accessible to traveling business people and to the 60% of the U.S. market that does not own a computer.