Voice Programming for Home Products
Voice programming is a new approach to making it easy for people set up, customize, and operate the increasingly complex devices found in modern homes. The basic idea is for the device to provide interactive spoken guidance about how to use it. We have developed generic software for building such interfaces and have demonstrated it by building prototypes for a simulated personal video recorder and a simulated programmable home thermostat.
Background & Objective: Digital processors are becoming a commonplace component of home products for entertainment, security, and housekeeping, leading to a veritable explosion of features and flexibility. The dark side of this trend, however, is that user interface technology has not kept pace. It is a now commonly observed fact that the overwhelming majority of the features of most new digitally-based devices are not used by the overwhelming majority customers. Our objective is to address this problem by taking advantage of recent advances in collaborative agents (see COLLAGEN project), intelligent tutoring (see Intelligent Agents for Operator Training and Task Guidance project) and spoken-language understanding (see DiamondTalk project).
Technical Discussion: Our most recent demonstration involves a home thermostat, in which the temperature of each room of a house is separately programmed for home, work, and sleep periods on weekdays and weekends. Similar features and issues arise in underground sprinkler control systems, personal video recorders, and home security systems. COLLAGEN provides us with a powerful and very general architecture for conversational, multimodal interaction. Another key element of our approach is the "Things to Say" list (see right side of figure above), which is dynamically generated from the task model and the current dialogue state and may include variables, such as "Today is
Technology Areas:
Spoken Language Interfaces
Off the Desktop Interaction and Display
Modification Date: September 12, 2007