Developing a Proxy Service to Bring Naturality to Amazon's Personal Assistant "Alexa"

TítuloDeveloping a Proxy Service to Bring Naturality to Amazon's Personal Assistant "Alexa"
Tipo de publicaciónConference Paper
Año de publicación
2017
Autores
Luis Carvajal
Luis Quesada
Gustavo López
Jose A. Brenes
Isabel L. Nunes
Conference Name
Advances in Human Factors and Systems Interaction
Fecha de publicación
06/2017
Editorial
Springer International Publishing
Conference Location
Cham
Número ISBN
978-3-319-60366-7
URL
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-60366-7_25
DOI
10.1007/978-3-319-60366-7_25
Palabras clave
Alexa
Amazon Echo
Intelligent personal assistant
Resumen

Amazon's Alexa is an intelligent personal assistant, developed to be used jointly with a Bluetooth Speaker and microphone hardware called Amazon Echo. Even though Alexa is supposed to be a natural user interface, its use is not very natural. As a user is intending to use Amazon's Alexa system, they must follow a very tighten and structured way to provide the commands for the system to achieve its goal. In this paper, we propose a proxy service called ``Plis''. This service was developed as a Skill to be used with the Amazon Echo. Therefore, a user can say: Alexa, ``plis'' and our functionality will start its job. Our skill determines from the natural way in which the user speaks what they are asking for. With that information, we create a query that would be further sent to other skills already providing the functionality required.