Modality Totality

For a man making his living in the wireless industry, Kirusa's Mike Sajor makes some awfully inappropriate comments about his chosen profession.

Take the one about how talking on the phone is an inherently unnatural human experience. That's bound to land him a few antagonizing stares from his industry colleagues, who have built their companies and staked their futures on the premise that people will pay good money to have impersonal conversations over great distances. But Sajor insists that human beings weren't just meant to be heard — they were meant to be seen as well. The inverse is also true: People don't only want to listen — they want to see.

Sajor even has a fancy name for his concept: multimodality. “Human beings, by design, are multimodal creatures,” Sajor said. “Even when people are on the phone, they naturally wave their arms when they're excited, or nod their heads when they're agreeing. They're creating visual stimuli they know the other person won't see. Despite themselves, they're being multimodal.”

Sajor may sound like a rabble-rouser trying to mess up the wireless industry's one good thing, but as Kirusa's vice president of business development, he's really just a businessman. The Berkeley Heights, N.J.-based Kirusa is now taking its funky multimodality concepts and applying them to data, developing middleware that allows users to interact with applications through both audio and visual methods.

For instance, say you're checking your e-mail. An application built on the Kirusa platform would allow you to read your messages on your mobile device. But if you chose to reply to a message, the application would switch to voice mode and you would dictate your response to voice recognition software and review your response on-screen before sending it off.

Kirusa doesn't develop the applications, but it is attracting attention from the developer community and the carriers that would implement its platform.

One developer, Tell-Eureka, is creating technical support applications for field technicians. A technician fixing a PBX system, for example, could use a PDA to access service records and repair manuals online through standard stylus-tapping methods. But when the time comes to start the actual repair, a technician who is buried under a mound of Ethernet cable with tools in each hand can't be burdened by a stylus and palmtop. He could, however, command a PDA audibly, telling it to record model numbers or to flip to the next page in the manual, said Tell-Eureka CEO Zor Gorelov.

“While we're developing the application, Kirusa's middleware does all the heavy lifting,” Gorelov said. “The multimodal technology is device- and network-independent. We don't have to worry about whether our software will work for any given customer.”

Technicians aren't the only ones who'll think multimodality is pretty nifty, according to Sajor. Carriers like Orange and France Telecom are investigating the platform's consumer and enterprise uses, and voice recognition firms such as Nuance are kicking ideas around in Kirusa's developer program.

Sure, multimodality hasn't become the latest catchword of the day, but it's certainly generating a buzz. Maybe Sajor's not so inappropriate after all.