How natural should a natural interface be?
Monday, February 16th, 2009I’m very happy to announce that, starting today, I will be working full-time on Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment to connect the web with language. I’ll be heading up research on different linguistic issues of import to a linguistic user interface and blogging about these topics here. If you’re interested, please subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed or the RSS feed for only Ubiquity-related items. Commenting is encouraged! ^^
Every day, more users are trying out Ubiquity, the Mozilla Labs experiment that lets users accomplish common Internet tasks faster through a natural language interface. As we live more and more of our lives on the web, there is a huge appeal to—and need for—a faster way to access and mashup our information.
But what exactly do we mean by a “natural language interface”? Is it just another programming language with lots of English keywords? Should the final goal be a computer that understands everything we tell it?
As we think about the future directions and possibilities of Ubiquity, we need to go back to our roots and understand the project’s motivations. With that in mind, here are some initial thoughts on the advantages of a natural language interface. The ultimate goal here is to refine the notion of natural language interface and to come up with a set of principles that we can follow in pushing Ubiquity further, into other languages and beyond.
