Automatically Generating and Improving Voice Command Interface from Operation Sequences on Smartphones

Lihang Pan, Chun Yu, Jiahui Li, Tian Huang, Xiaojun Bi, Yuanchun Shi

Abstract: Using voice commands to automate smartphone tasks (e.g., making a video call) can effectively augment the interactivity of numerous mobile apps. However, creating voice command interfaces requires a tremendous amount of effort in labeling and compiling the graphical user interface (GUI) and the utterance data. In this paper, we propose AutoVCI, a novel approach to automatically generate voice command interface (VCI) from smartphone operation sequences. The generated voice command interface has two distinct features. First, it automatically maps a voice command to GUI operations and fills in parameters accordingly, leveraging the GUI data instead of corpus or hand-written rules. Second, it launches a complementary Q&A dialogue to confirm the intention in case of ambiguity. In addition, the generated voice command interface can learn and evolve from user interactions. It accumulates the history command understanding results to annotate the user’s input and improve its semantic understanding ability. We implemented this approach on Android devices and conducted a two-phase user study with 16 and 67 participants in each phase. Experimental results of the study demonstrated the practical feasibility of AutoVCI.