An Automation Script Generation Technique for the Smart Home

Abstract

A home automation system means monitoring and controlling various kinds of devices in the home remotely using the Internet of things (IoT). Technologies such as natural language processing techniques, user-friendly visual programming, and machine intelligence programming are already available for home automation. For such systems, the increase in the number of devices often makes users focused on the system’s ability to perform complex or composing tasks. However, some existing natural language processing systems can only perform simple tasks and cannot meet users’ needs. Thus, it is difficult for users to develop the home automation systems they need using visual programming systems because of the large amount of programming knowledge required. Meanwhile, automatic programming without user action can only write a few lines of code and implement little functionality. There are relatively few tools available for generating home automation scripting languages. To address this problem, we propose a practical method for generating executable home automation scripts using Chinese texts. Our method includes the following steps: it extracts critical information from the command sentences in Chinese; it uses first-order logic to check the validity of the extracted information; based on the validation, the correct sentences are mapped into the intermediate language scripts, which can interface with different home platforms. We conducted experiments on Home Assistant, converted intermediate scripts to Home Assistant, and collected 600 scenario descriptions. The experimental results show that the method can automatically generate executable scripts for the Home Assistant platform, and the correct rate was 93.66%.