"Where Are the Christmas Decorations?" : A Memory Assistant for Storage Locations
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``"Where Are the Christmas Decorations?" : A Memory Assistant for Storage Locations'', by Lewis G. Creary and Michael VanHilst. In Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on the Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB'01), June 28-29, 2001, Madrid, pp. 165-175.
Abstract
At Hewlett-Packard Laboratories we want to know how inexpensive it can
be to endow mobile personal assistants with the ability to speak
naturally with their users. To this end, we are investigating and
demonstrating speech-capable mobile personal assistants that can be
realized using common off-the-shelf hardware and software components,
a modest development effort, and wireless connectivity. As a part of
this activity, we built a storage location memory assistant by
connecting a voice front end on a PDA to a database back end on a
remote server, with speech, natural language, and dialog processing in
between. Specifically, the storage location memory assistant saves
and retrieves information about the locations of stored objects in and
around the user's house. Here is a sample dialog:
User: Where are the Christmas decorations?
PDA:
They're in the leftmost medium-sized white box under the wood
table in the garage.
To implement the storage location memory assistant, we leveraged
technologies in speech recording, voice recognition, parser
generation, and database management to produce domain-limited natural
language understanding and semi-structured knowledge representation.
In this paper, we describe the architecture of the system, and some of
the more interesting technical details.
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