Voice-Programming for Houses
Speaker: Tommy Herbert
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Abstract:
Home automation has been commercially popular since the 1980s. It allows you to say the words "Turn off the lights in the living room", and your house's central computer will hear the command, obey it, and let you know that it's done so in natural language. But it would be nice to harness the power of natural language to allow more complicated commands like "Keep calling the hospital until they answer the phone" - which contains an implicit loop. I've used a Wizard of Oz method to collect a corpus of voice-commands for five different programming
constructs: loops, conditionals, function declaration, class declaration and reference mechanisms. I'm also adapting an existing dialogue system, TownInfo, to implement a voice-controlled house with the ability to implement user-defined loops.