Early Lessons from a Voice-Only Interface for Finding Movies
This work addresses the need for deeper voice-based recommendation systems for users of streaming devices, but it is incremental as it builds on existing technology without major innovations.
The researchers tackled the problem of limited voice interactions in streaming media by building MovieLens TV, a voice-only movie recommender system, and reported early lessons from prototyping with an Amazon Echo.
The current generation of streaming media players often allow users to speak commands (e.g., users can change the TV channel by pressing a button and saying "ESPN"). However, these devices typically support a narrow range of control- and search-oriented commands, and do not support deeper recommendation or exploration queries. To study spoken natural language interactions with recommenders, we have built MovieLens TV, a movie recommender system with no input modalities except voice. In this poster, we describe MovieLens TV, with a focus on lessons learned building a prototype system around an off-the-shelf Amazon Echo.