"Where Are the Christmas Decorations?": A Memory Assistant for Storage Locations

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 tec...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: NLDB
• Authors: Lewis G. Creary, Michael VanHilst
• Keywords: Location Memory Assistant, Mobile Personal Assistants, Natural Language Processing, NLDB 2001, Storage Location Memory