End-User Development of Voice User Interfaces based on Web content

Voice Assistants, and particularly the latest gadgets called smart speakers, allow end users to interact with applications by means of voice commands. As usual, end users are able to install applications (also called skills) that are available in repositories and fulfill multiple purposes. In this work we present an end-user environment to define skills for voice assistants based on the extraction of Web content and their organization into different voice navigation patterns. We describe the approach, the end-user development environment, and finally we present some case studies based on Alexa and Amazon Echo

End-User Development of Voice User Interfaces based on Web content

Voice Assistants, and particularly the latest gadgets called smart speakers, allow end users to interact with applications by means of voice commands. As usual, end users are able to install applications (also called skills) that are available in repositories and fulfill multiple purposes. In this work we present an end-user environment to define skills for voice assistants based on the extraction of Web content and their organization into different voice navigation patterns. We describe the approach, the end-user development environment, and finally we present some case studies based on Alexa and Amazon Echo.Publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 11553).Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Conversational interfaces and the Web

Conversational User Interfaces (CUI), both in voice interaction and chatbot ways, have become an important and popular way of interacting with current applications. These kinds of interfaces are nowadays spreading around the Web for multiple purposes, although the vast majority of Web sites do not provide them yet. There is still a huge gap between what Web applications allow users to do via Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), and what CUI offers. Also, there are unanswered questions about CUI design and its usability impacts on web browsing. Although other approaches for CUIs creation, the proposed approach transfers the responsibility of creating the conversational interfaces to the users of the Web browser, instead of remaining an implementation decision taken by the Web site owners. In this sense, an End-User Development (EUD) environment was designed to allow end users to define conversational interfaces by themself, based on annotations of UI elements from Web Sites. In the case of Chatbots, plugged into the target Web sites, and in the case of Voice Interfaces (VUI), creating applications for smart speakers’ devices based on third-party Web sites content. The underlying ideas and the reference architecture could be used to create tools that allow fast prototyping of CUIs, which could be important to conduct exploratory studies about the impact of using them in Web applications.Facultad de Informátic

Staging Transformations for Multimodal Web Interaction Management

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations -- a theory for representing and reasoning about dialogs based on partial input. It supports multiple interaction interfaces, and offers sessioning, caching, and co-ordination functions through the use of an interaction manager. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the promise of this approach.Comment: Describes framework and software architecture for multimodal web interaction managemen

Challenges in Developing Applications for Aging Populations

Elderly individuals can greatly benefit from the use of computer applications, which can assist in monitoring health conditions, staying in contact with friends and family, and even learning new things. However, developing accessible applications for an elderly user can be a daunting task for developers. Since the advent of the personal computer, the benefits and challenges of developing applications for older adults have been a hot topic of discussion. In this chapter, the authors discuss the various challenges developers who wish to create applications for the elderly computer user face, including age-related impairments, generational differences in computer use, and the hardware constraints mobile devices pose for application developers. Although these challenges are concerning, each can be overcome after being properly identified