VASTA: A Vision and Language-assisted Smartphone Task Automation System
This addresses the challenge of creating generalizable and user-friendly automation for smartphone users, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing PBD and vision-language methods.
The paper tackles the problem of automating smartphone tasks through Programming By Demonstration (PBD) by developing VASTA, a system that uses vision and language to robustly handle UI changes and user utterances, with an initial user study showing effectiveness in clustering utterances, detecting UI elements, and automating tasks.
We present VASTA, a novel vision and language-assisted Programming By Demonstration (PBD) system for smartphone task automation. Development of a robust PBD automation system requires overcoming three key challenges: first, how to make a particular demonstration robust to positional and visual changes in the user interface (UI) elements; secondly, how to recognize changes in the automation parameters to make the demonstration as generalizable as possible; and thirdly, how to recognize from the user utterance what automation the user wishes to carry out. To address the first challenge, VASTA leverages state-of-the-art computer vision techniques, including object detection and optical character recognition, to accurately label interactions demonstrated by a user, without relying on the underlying UI structures. To address the second and third challenges, VASTA takes advantage of advanced natural language understanding algorithms for analyzing the user utterance to trigger the VASTA automation scripts, and to determine the automation parameters for generalization. We run an initial user study that demonstrates the effectiveness of VASTA at clustering user utterances, understanding changes in the automation parameters, detecting desired UI elements, and, most importantly, automating various tasks. A demo video of the system is available here: http://y2u.be/kr2xE-FixjI