Towards Spoken Language Interfaces for Mobile Applications

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. CHI’16 Workshop, May 7–8, 2016, San Jose, CA, USA. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. Abstract People are able to interact with domain-specific intelligent assistants (IA) via spoken language interfaces to access mobile applications. However, sometimes user goals are complex and may require interactions with multiple applications/domains. However current IAs are limited to specific domains and users have to directly manage execution spanning multiple applications in order to engage in more complex activities. An ideal personal agent would be able to model user intents at different levels (single-domain to cross-domain dialogues). This paper addresses several challenges about hierarchical language understanding in the context of spoken dialogue systems (SDS). Our experiments show that language understanding at different levels allows an agent to actively suggest apps relevant to pursuing particular user goals and reduce the cost of users’ self-management.