A conversational interface to web automation

  • Authors:
  • Tessa Lau;Julian Cerruti;Guillermo Manzato;Mateo Bengualid;Jeffrey P. Bigham;Jeffrey Nichols

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM Research - Almaden, San Jose, CA, USA;IBM Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina;IBM Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina;IBM Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina;University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA;IBM Research - Almaden, San Jose, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

This paper presents CoCo, a system that automates web tasks on a user's behalf through an interactive conversational interface. Given a short command such as "get road conditions for highway 88," CoCo synthesizes a plan to accomplish the task, executes it on the web, extracts an informative response, and returns the result to the user as a snippet of text. A novel aspect of our approach is that we leverage a repository of previously recorded web scripts and the user's personal web browsing history to determine how to complete each requested task. This paper describes the design and implementation of our system, along with the results of a brief user study that evaluates how likely users are to understand what CoCo does for them.