Smart Email System

1. Smart Email System Aarthi Natarajan Suhaib A. Obeidat Ganesh Sridharan

2. Outline • Motivation • High-level Design • Functional Design • E-mail message and address book sorting/prioritizing • Device Control Using E-mail • Voice Interface • Implementation • Performance Metrics • Future work • Conclusions

3. Motivation • Reduce Human Distraction • Free hands, eyes • Less time to achieve tasks (user behavior, voice) • Least amount of attention • Provide more services and flexibility • Access over a phone • Remote control of devices • Ability to prioritize.

4. User Interface (GUI + Voice-Enhanced) Message Sorting and Prioritizing Device Control Module E-mail System Interface Arrival Notification Module User Behavior Monitor (capturer) SMTP IMAP HLD

5. Display Management • Sorting of emails – based on the user access patterns • Sorting the address book – based on the frequency of correspondence. • Notifying the user of new message arrival: • Access to the user’s calendar • frequency of correspondence • user-assigned trust • subject keywords

6. Store E-mails Addresses and Priorities • Emails addresses, user access pattern, frequency of correspondence and trust level are stored as an XML element in an XML file. • Whenever the e-mail client is active, it is loaded into the memory from the file system as stored in a hash table. • Periodically, the XML file is updated from the hash table.

7. Device Control Using E-mail • Reduces human distraction by eliminating the need for physical movement. • Ability to control different appliances/devices remotely: • Devices connected to serial or parallel port • Why not USB ? future work. • Auto-response to provide feedback.

8. Device Control Using E-mail-Cont • An e-mail address is assigned for the purpose of hardware control (e.g., my_home@domain.com). • Sender address is checked • A digital signature can be used for security purposes. • Computer that has control of the h/w is on-line all time, with the e-mail client running. • Upon message arrival, subject line is parsed: • E.g. “A.C: Switch On” • Create an e-mail message destined to the user, with the result of the operation (e.g., success, fail, device is not connected).

9. Voice Interface • Speech Synthesis: • Text-to-speech (TTS) • Notification, message text, etc. • Speech Recognition • Speech-to-text (STT) • Rule-based grammar (higher accuracy of recognition). As opposed to dictation free recognition. • Temporal-awareness.

10. Computers can speak “Computers can speak” Application Speech Synthesizer Speech Synthesis • Synthesizers provide the computer with the ability to speak. • Users and applications provide text to a speech synthesizer, which is then converted to audio. • Bad news: does not sound natural.

11. Speech Recognition • Structure Analysis: start and end of paragraphs, sentences, and other structures • Text pre-processing: abbreviations, dates, numbers, currency amounts (etc.) • Text-to-phoneme conversion: times  t ay m s • Prosody analysis: determine appropriate prosody for the sentence • Waveform production: • Concatenation of chunks of recorded human voice • Formant synthesis: signal processing techniques based on knowledge of how phonemes sound and how prosody affects those phonemes

12. Why Voice • Allows access over a phone • User’s hands are occupied • User has physical disability (e.g., limited use of hands). • User’s eyes are looking at something other than the screen (e.g., driving, maintenance and repair, etc). • User has physical disability (e.g., visual impairment)

13. Challenges Involved • Transience: “what did you say” ? • Invisibility: what actions to perform ? • Asymmetry: people can speak faster than they can type, but listen much more slowly than they can read. • Synthesis quality: recorded or synthesized ? • Recognition: flexibility vs. accuracy.

14. Design Issues in Speech Applications • Feedback and Latency: • People read meaning in pauses • Speech applications cause pauses in places where they do not naturally belong. • Prompts: • Assessing the tradeoff between flexibility and performance. • Explicit prompts: when user must be tightly constrained • Implicit prompts: when application is able to accept more flexible input • Handling errors: no repetition, more constrained grammar.

15. E-mail Protocols-IMAP • Internet Message Access Protocol • Incoming Mail Protocol • Provide support for different access modes: • Online:NSF-like (connection maintained throughout) • Offline: download and delete from server (periodic connections. • Disconnected (hybrid) :download, manipulate, upload. • Offline paradigm allows minimum connect time • Constructs to permit online performance optimization, especially over low-speed links.

16. E-mail Protocols-SMTP • Simple Mail Transfer Protocol • Sending e-mail messages between servers or from a client to a server • Proved useful in the wireless domain (e.g., used in SMS). • Drawback: not fast enough (e-mail was not intended for wireless).

17. E-mail Protocols-MIME • Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions. • How messages must be formatted so that they can be exchanged between different email systems. • Compatible with WAP.

18. Implementation • Java-based e-mail client. • IMAP, SMTP and MIME • XML-based display manager • JSAPI for speech synthesis and recognition • FreeTTS speech synthesizer(written entirely in Java). • ViaVoice speech recognizer (from IBM). • JavaComm for hardware control. • Mapping device name to corresponding port. • Interfacing from the mail system to the particular device.

19. Performance Metrics • Subjective Tests: • User Distraction. • Usability study (I.e., Flexibility of Use, UI convenience). • Accuracy (e.g., of the voice interface, the remote control of the hardware).

20. Extending the hardware control capabilities of the system E.g., wireless access to the different devices Harmonic control of the overall system. Providing speech recognition allowing for user-machine dialogues. Web-based Implementation Access over a phone Future Work

21. Conclusions • Capabilities of a context-aware e-mail system can go way beyond the traditional functionality. • Implementing voice-enhanced systems introduces many issues. • Ubiquitous Computing is a revolutionary rather than evolutionary field.