Fanglin Chen, Kewei Xia, Karan Dhabalia, and Jason I. Hong

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)

May 2019

Text messages are sometimes prompts that lead to information related tasks, e.g. checking one’s schedule, creating reminders, or sharing content. We introduce MessageOnTap, a suggestive interface for smartphones that uses the text in a conversation to suggest task shortcuts that can streamline likely next actions. When activated, MessageOnTap uses word embeddings to rank relevant external apps, and parameterizes associated task shortcuts using key phrases mentioned in the conversation, such as times, persons, or events. MessageOnTap also tailors the auto-complete dictionary based on text in the conversation, to streamline any text input. We first conducted a month-long study of messaging behaviors (N=22) that informed our design. We then conducted a lab study to evaluate the effectiveness of MessageOnTap’s suggestive interface, and found that participants can complete tasks 3.1x faster with MessageOnTap than their typical task flow.

intelligent agents, messaging, named entity recognition, smartphone, tasks