About Us

We design technology to support groups, from families and friends to events and organizations. Our work explores multimodal communication through conveying presence, sharing experiences and creating new ways to work and play together. We are particularly interested in improving interactions with technology in daily life.

The Speech + Mobility Group has roots in a long history of research into speech-based user interaction, multimodal messaging, and computer integrated telephony. We were also pioneers in the development of location-based mobile services.

Current work is based on the near ubiquity of wireless networks, sensor-laden mobile devices, and changing personal communication habits. We emphasize the design and prototyping of systems consistent with our research goals. "Speech" in our name reflects an emphasis on communication and links us to our roots; we no longer focus on voice dialogue systems.

Speech + Mobility was formerly known as Speech Interfaces (you can find our old website here), and in addition to being a founding group at the Media Lab, traces its origins back to the Architecture Machine Group in the late 1970s.