As devices proliferate, the ability for us to interact with
them in an intuitive and meaningful way becomes increasingly
challenging. In this paper we take the typical home as an
experimental environment to investigate the challenges and potential
solutions arising from ever-increasing device proliferation
and complexity. We describe and evaluate a potential solution
based on conversational interactions between “things” in the
environment where those things can be either machine devices
or human users. Our key innovation is the use of a Controlled
Natural Language (CNL) technology as the underpinning information
representation language for both machine and human
agents, enabling humans and machines to trivially “read” the
information being exchanged. The core CNL is augmented with
a conversational protocol enabling different speech acts to be
exchanged within the system. This conversational layer enables
key contextual information to be conveyed, as well as providing
a mechanism for translation from the core CNL to other forms,
such as device specific API (Application Programming Interface)
requests, or more easily consumable human representations. Our
goal is to show that a single, uniform language can support
machine-machine, machine-human, human-machine and humanhuman
interaction in a dynamic environment that is able to
rapidly evolve to accommodate new devices and capabilities as
they are encountered. We also report results from our first formal
evaluation of a Conversational Homes prototype and demonstrate
users with no previous experience of this environment are able
to rapidly and effectively interact with simulated devices in a
number of simple scenarios
