Patent ID: 8352908

Claim:
A method for generating a Conversation User Interface (CUI) from a graphical user interface (GUI) comprising: importing GUI form code comprising a plurality of GUI elements; generating a user interface description from the GUI form code, where the user interface description comprises a user interface element for each of the GUI elements of the GUI form code; for each of user interface element converted from a corresponding to one of the GUI elements, determining a user interface element type for the user interface element, wherein said determined user interface element type is one of a plurality of different element types; for each user interface element, determining temporal associations between the user interface element and other ones of the user interface elements, wherein said temporal associations are dependent upon characteristics of the corresponding GUI element relative to other ones of the GUI elements within the GUI form code; determining whether disambiguation is needed for any of the GUI elements when generating the user interface description; when no disambiguation is needed, automatically generating the user interface description from the GUI form code without any user input; when disambiguation is needed, prompting a user for disambiguation input for each GUI element for which disambiguation is needed, receiving a user response to the prompting, disambiguating otherwise ambiguous GUI elements utilizing the user response when generating the user interface description; creating Conversation User Interface (CUI) code corresponding to the GUI form code from the user interface description, wherein the conversation user interface (CUI) code and the graphical form code is integrated and synchronized to form multi-modal user interface code having a visual and a voice interactive modality; when creating the Conversation User Interface (CUI) code for each of the user interface elements of the user interface description, utilizing a different and rules to convert the user interface element into Conversation User Interface (CUI) code depending on a user interface element type of the user interface element being converted, and when creating the Conversation User Interface (CUI) code, temporally ordering the user interface elements based on the determined temporal associations between the user interface elements.