Abstract
Voice-based interfaces have become one of the most popular device capabilities, recently being regarded as one flagship user experience of smart consumer devices. However, the lack of common coordination mechanisms might often degrade the user experience, especially when interacting with multiple voice-enabled devices located closely. For example, a hotword or wake-up utterance such as “hi Bixby” or “ok Google” frequently triggers redundant responses by several nearby smartphones. Motivated by the problem of uncoordinated react of voice-enabled devices especially in a multiple device environment, in this paper, we discuss the notion of an ephemeral group of consumer devices in which the member devices and the transient lifetime are implicitly determined by an external event (e.g., hotword detection) without any provisioned group structure, and specifically we concentrate on the time-constrained leader election process in such an ephemeral group. To do so: (i) We first present the sound-based multiple device communication framework, namely tailtag, that leverages the isomorphic capability of consumer devices for the tasks of processing hotword events and transmitting data over sound, and thus renders both the tasks confined to the same room area and enables the spontaneous leader election process in a unstructured group upon a hotword event. (ii) To improve the success rate of the leader election with a given time constraint, we then develop the adaptive messaging scheme especially tailored for sound-based data communication that inherently has low data rate. Our adaptive scheme utilizes an application-specific score that is individually calculated by a member device for each event detection, and employs score-based scheduling by which messages of a high score are scheduled first and so unnecessary message transmission can be suppressed during the election process. (iii) Through experiments, we also demonstrate that, when a hotword is detected by multiple smartphones in a room, the framework with the adaptive messaging scheme enables them to successfully achieve a coordinated response under the given latency bound, yielding an insignificant non-consensus probability, no more than 2%.
Highlights
Theses days, voice-based interfaces and assistants (e.g., Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, and Samsung Bixby) have obtained attention from the consumer device markets.Besides high-end smartphones equipped with voice-based interfaces and several auxiliary sensors, a set of new voice-enable devices of different form factors, e.g., Home speaker [1] and Familyhub refrigerator [2], have been introduced, and even resource-constrained wearables and smartwatchesSensors 2019, 19, 1883; doi:10.3390/s19081883 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensorsSensors 2019, 19, 1883 have become more capable of natural interactions
An ephemeral group is temporal and no provision at the infrastructure level for the group management is assumed. We focus on such an ephemeral group being triggered by a hotword event in a room, and investigate its coordination mechanism tailored for timely reacting to the event
The adaptive algorithms ad_D, ad_RD both outperformed the other algorithms and showed about 98% accuracy with five devices and slow dynamics case, which we considered one of the commonly recognized multiple user, multiple device environment settings for the uncoordinated react by hotword scenarios
Summary
Theses days, voice-based interfaces and assistants (e.g., Google Assistant, Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, and Samsung Bixby) have obtained attention from the consumer device markets. The leader election problem for our ephemeral group setting, is more practical and requires a specific solution under the following two conditions: (i) to maintain the same room area context between event detection and group communication, devices utilize sound for data transmission; and (ii) to meet the user interaction requirements of voice-based interfaces, the time bound of each election process is strictly restricted. Under these two conditions, we develop an adaptive messaging scheme that can be seen as a variant of bully algorithms [13,16], yet adapted for sound-based data communication and time-constrained leader election.
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