Visual authoring tool for presentation agent based on Multimodal Presentation Markup Language

The paper proposes a visual authoring tool for a presentation agent system on the Web. In presentation systems, it is more fascinating when we conduct the presentation stream via the explanation or conversation of presenters. In order to provide a presentation on demand on the Web, we need a character based presentation agent. There are several ways to control such agents but some are too complex to be used by general users; we propose an easy method for controlling agents. For this purpose, we have developed Multimodal Presentation Markup Language (MPML), which allows many users to write attractive multimodal presentations easily. MPML is a markup language conforming to Extensible Markup Language (XML) and it supports functions for controlling verbal presentation and agent behavior. The authors present MPML´s specification, visual authoring tool, and the application of MPML when used as a tool for composing multimodal presentations on the WWW