A Universal Speech Interface for Appliances

Can a single, universal speech interface look-and-feel be used to effectively control a wide variety of appliances? Can such an interface be automatically derived from a functional appliance specification? We built the Speech Graffiti Personal Universal Controller (SG-PUC), a universal interface and framework for human-appliance speech interaction, as a proof-of-concept. Its specification language and communications protocol effectively separate the SG-PUC from the appliances that it controls, enabling mobile and universal speech-based appliance control. To realize such an automatically derived dialog system, the controller employs a universal control language. The development of interfaces to numerous appliances and the results of user studies demonstrate the usefulness of the SG-PUC, indicating that high quality and low cost human-appliance speech interface can be largely appliance agnostic. This investigation also helps to validate the principles of Speech Graffiti as a speech interface paradigm, and provides a baseline for future studies in this area.