A Conversational Approach for Modifying Service Mashups in IoT Environments

Abstract

Existing conversational approaches for Internet of Things (IoT) service mashup do not support modification because of the usability challenge, although it is common for users to modify the service mashups in IoT environments. To support the modification of IoT service mashups through conversational interfaces in a usable manner, we propose the conversational mashup modification agent (CoMMA). Users can modify IoT service mashups using CoMMA through natural language conversations. CoMMA has a two-step mashup modification interaction, an implicature-based localization step, and a modification step with a disambiguation strategy. The localization step allows users to easily search for a mashup by vocalizing their expressions in the environment. The modification step supports users to modify mashups by speaking simple modification commands. We conducted a user study and the results show that CoMMA is as effective as visual approaches in terms of task completion time and perceived task workload for modifying IoT service mashups.