State Your Intention to Steer Your Attention: An AI Assistant for Intentional Digital Living
This addresses productivity and psychological issues for digital device users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing intent-based systems with AI enhancements.
The paper tackles digital distractions by introducing an AI assistant that uses a large language model to detect deviations from user-stated intentions and provides nudges, showing in a three-week study with 22 participants that it effectively helps users maintain focus and align behavior with intentions.
When working on digital devices, people often face distractions that can lead to a decline in productivity and efficiency, as well as negative psychological and emotional impacts. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant that elicits a user's intention, assesses whether ongoing activities are in line with that intention, and provides gentle nudges when deviations occur. The system leverages a large language model to analyze screenshots, application titles, and URLs, issuing notifications when behavior diverges from the stated goal. Its detection accuracy is refined through initial clarification dialogues and continuous user feedback. In a three-week, within-subjects field deployment with 22 participants, we compared our assistant to both a rule-based intent reminder system and a passive baseline that only logged activity. Results indicate that our AI assistant effectively supports users in maintaining focus and aligning their digital behavior with their intentions. Our source code is publicly available at https://intentassistant.github.io