Online Paper: Franklin-IUI00

Jabberwocky: You don't have to be a rocket scientist to change slides for a hydrogen combustion lecture

In designing Jabberwocky--a speech-based interface to Microsoft PowerPoint--we have tried to go beyond simple commands like "Next slide, please" and make a tool that aids speakers as they present and even learns as they rehearse their presentations. Jabberwocky looks at the contents of the slides, extracting key words and phrases and associating them with their places in the presentation. By listening for these phrases (and synonymous phrases derived using syntactic rules) Jabberwocky is able to follow along with the presentation, switching slides at the appropriate moments. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of this system--a component of our Intelligent Classroom project--and look at how we are using it.