UMIM (1.3.0)

Unified Multimodal Interaction Management (UMIM) provides an interaction level interface between the interaction manager (IM) - a decision making unit - and an interactive system executing the commands from the IM.

The goal of the Unified Multimodal Interaction Management (UMIM) standard is to define an architectural pattern for integrating interaction management components into an interactive system and a standard API that enables a high degree of interoperability between interaction management components and the applications that use them. UMIM provides an interaction level interface between the interaction manager and the interactive system abstracting away technical implementation details of the interactive system.

Interaction Management is the process of deciding what actions an interactive system must take in response to user actions or other events. Dialog management is a particular type of interaction management which is mainly concerned with deciding what the system should say in response to what the user said. In practice, multiple modalities (chat, voice, display, gestures, sounds, lights, etc.) are used more and more, both for input and output.

Let’s start by diving a bit deeper into the motivation for UMIM.