This preface tells the story of how Multimodal Usability responds to a special challenge. Chapter 1 describes the goals and structure of this book. The idea of describing how to make multimodal computer systems usable arose in the European Network of Excellence SIMILAR - "Taskforce for cre- ing human-machine interfaces SIMILAR to human-human communication," 2003- 2007, www. similar. cc. SIMILAR brought together people from multimodal signal processing and usability with the aim of creating enabling technologies for new kinds of multimodal systems and demonstrating results in research prototypes. Most of our colleagues in the network were, in fact, busy extracting features and guring out how to demonstrate progress in working interactive systems, while claiming not to have too much of a notion of usability in system development and evaluation. It was proposed that the authors support the usability of the many multimodal pro- types underway by researching and presenting a methodology for building usable multimodal systems. We accepted the challenge, rst and foremost, no doubt, because the formidable team spirit in SIMILAR could make people accept outrageous things. Second, h- ing worked for nearly two decades on making multimodal systems usable, we were curious - curious at the opportunity to try to understand what happens to traditional usability work, that is, work in human-computer interaction centred around tra- tional graphical user interfaces (GUIs), when systems become as multimodal and as advanced in other ways as those we build in research today.

This preface tells the story of how Multimodal Usability responds to a special challenge. Chapter 1 describes the goals and structure of this book. The idea of describing how to make multimodal computer systems usable arose in the European Network of Excellence SIMILAR - "Taskforce for cre- ing human-machine interfaces SIMILAR to human-human communication," 2003- 2007, www. similar. cc. SIMILAR brought together people from multimodal signal processing and usability with the aim of creating enabling technologies for new kinds of multimodal systems and demonstrating results in research prototypes. Most of our colleagues in the network were, in fact, busy extracting features and guring out how to demonstrate progress in working interactive systems, while claiming not to have too much of a notion of usability in system development and evaluation. It was proposed that the authors support the usability of the many multimodal pro- types underway by researching and presenting a methodology for building usable multimodal systems. We accepted the challenge, rst and foremost, no doubt, because the formidable team spirit in SIMILAR could make people accept outrageous things. Second, h- ing worked for nearly two decades on making multimodal systems usable, we were curious - curious at the opportunity to try to understand what happens to traditional usability work, that is, work in human-computer interaction centred around tra- tional graphical user interfaces (GUIs), when systems become as multimodal and as advanced in other ways as those we build in research today.

The main topic of this volume is natural multimodal interaction. The book isunique in that it brings together a great many contributions regarding aspectsof natural and multimodal interaction written by many of the important actorsin the field. It is a timely update of Multimodality in Language and SpeechSystems by Bjorn Granstrom, David House and Inger Karlsson and, at the sametime, it presents a much broader overview of the field. Its 17 chaptersprovide a broad and detailed impression of where the fairly new field ofnatural and multimodal interactivity engineering stands today. Topicsaddressed include talking heads, conversational agents, tutoring systems, multimodal communication, machine learning, architectures for multimodaldialogue systems, systems evaluation, and data annotation."

The main topic of this volume is natural multimodal interaction. The book is unique in that it brings together a great many contributions regarding aspects of natural and multimodal interaction written by many of the important actors in the field. It is a timely update of Multimodality in Language and Speech Systems by Bjorn Granstrom, David House and Inger Karlsson and, at the same time, it presents a much broader overview of the field. Its 17 chapters provide a broad and detailed impression of where the fairly new field of natural and multimodal interactivity engineering stands today. Topics addressed include talking heads, conversational agents, tutoring systems, multimodal communication, machine learning, architectures for multimodal dialogue systems, systems evaluation, and data annotation."