VoCoG: An Intelligent, Non-Intrusive Assistant for Voice-based Collaborative Group-Viewing
This addresses the challenge of multi-user interfaces for shared media consumption, offering a solution for groups like friends or families, but it is incremental as it builds on existing recommendation and conversation analysis methods.
The paper tackles the problem of designing an intelligent system for voice-based collaborative group viewing, enabling multiple users to explore and decide on movies together non-intrusively, with results showing it provides a good user experience and relevant recommendations based on usability surveys and usage data analysis.
There have been significant innovations in media technologies in the recent years. While these developments have improved experiences for individual users, design of multi-user interfaces still remains a challenge. A relatively unexplored area in this context, is enabling multiple users to enjoy shared viewing (e.g. deciding on movies to watch together). In particular, the challenge is to design an intelligent system which would enable viewers to explore together shows or movies they like, seamlessly. This is a complex design problem, as it requires the system to (i) assess affinities of individual users (movies or genres), (ii) combine individual preferences taking into account user-user interactions, and (iii) be non-intrusive simultaneously. The proposed system VoCoG, is an end-to-end intelligent system for collaborative viewing. VoCoG incorporates an online recommendation algorithm, efficient methods for analyzing natural conversation and a graph-based method to fuse preferences of multiple users. It takes user conversation as input, making it non-intrusive. A usability survey of the system indicates that the system provides a good experience to the users as well as relevant recommendations. Further analysis of the usage data reveals insights about the nature of conversation during the interaction sessions, final consensus among the users as well as ratings of varied user groups.