With the advance of speech, image and video technology, human–computer interaction (HCI) will reach a new phase.In recent years, HCI has been extended to human–machine communication (HMC) and the perceptual user interface (PUI). The final goal in HMC is that the communication between humans and machines is similar to human-to-human communication. Moreover, the machine can support human-to-human communication (e.g. an interface for the disabled). For this reason, various aspects of human communication are to be considered in HMC. The HMC interface, called a multimodal interface, includes different types of input methods, such as natural language, gestures, face and handwriting characters.The nine papers in this book have been selected from the 92 high-quality papers constituting the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Multimodal Interface (ICMI '99), which was held in Hong Kong in 1999. The papers cover a wide spectrum of the multimodal interface.

With the advance of speech, image and video technology, human–computer interaction (HCI) will reach a new phase.In recent years, HCI has been extended to human–machine communication (HMC) and the perceptual user interface (PUI). The final goal in HMC is that the communication between humans and machines is similar to human-to-human communication. Moreover, the machine can support human-to-human communication (e.g. an interface for the disabled). For this reason, various aspects of human communication are to be considered in HMC. The HMC interface, called a multimodal interface, includes different types of input methods, such as natural language, gestures, face and handwriting characters.The nine papers in this book have been selected from the 92 high-quality papers constituting the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Multimodal Interface (ICMI '99), which was held in Hong Kong in 1999. The papers cover a wide spectrum of the multimodal interface.