natural

This paper presents CoCo, a system that automates web tasks on a user's behalf through an interactive conversational interface. Given a short command such as "get road conditions for highway 88," CoCo synthesizes a plan to accomplish the task, executes it on the web, extracts an informative response, and returns the result to the user as a snippet of text. A novel aspect of our approach is that we leverage a repository of previously recorded web scripts and the user's personal web browsing history to determine how to complete each requested task. This paper describes the design and implementation of our system, along with the results of a brief user study that evaluates how likely users are to understand what CoCo does for them.

We present Inky, a command line for shortcut access to common web tasks. Inky aims to capture the efficiency benefits of typed commands while mitigating their usability problems. Inky commands have little or no new syntax to learn, and the system displays rich visual feedback while the user is typing, including missing parameters and contextual information automatically clipped from the target web site. Inky is an example of a new kind of hybrid between a command line and a GUI interface. We describe the design and implementation of two prototypes of this idea, and report the results of a preliminary user study.