Automatic Generation of Chatbots for Conversational Web Browsing
This addresses the challenge of making web content and functionality more accessible through conversational interfaces, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing annotation and chatbot technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling natural language interaction with websites by automatically generating chatbots from annotated HTML, allowing users to 'talk to websites' instead of using traditional graphical interfaces, and demonstrates a functional demo on Amazon Alexa.
In this paper, we describe the foundations for generating a chatbot out of a website equipped with simple, bot-specific HTML annotations. The approach is part of what we call conversational web browsing, i.e., a dialog-based, natural language interaction with websites. The goal is to enable users to use content and functionality accessible through rendered UIs by "talking to websites" instead of by operating the graphical UI using keyboard and mouse. The chatbot mediates between the user and the website, operates its graphical UI on behalf of the user, and informs the user about the state of interaction. We describe the conceptual vocabulary and annotation format, the supporting conversational middleware and techniques, and the implementation of a demo able to deliver conversational web browsing experiences through Amazon Alexa.