This book describes an innovative approach to the interaction between humans and a smart environment; an attempt to get a smart home to understand intuitive, multi-modal, human-centred communication. State of the art smart homes, like other -smart- technology, tend to demand that the human user must adapt herself to the needs of the system. The hunt for a truly user-centred, truly intuitive system has long proven to be beyond the grasp of current technology.

When humans speak with one another, we are multimodal. Our speech is supplemented with gestures, which serve as a parallel...