Nlify: Mobile spoken natural language interfaces for everyone

Speech has become an attractive means for interacting with the phone. When speech-enabled interactions are few, keyword-based interfaces [1] that require users to remember precise invocations are adequate. As the number of such interactions increases, users are more likely to forget keywords, and spoken natural language (SNL) interfaces that allow users to express their functional intent without conforming to a rigid syntax become desirable. Prominent “first-party” systems such as Siri and Google Voice Search offer such functionality on select domains today. In this demo, we present a system, NLify, which enables any (“third-party”) developer to add an SNL interface to their application. The key challenge behind the system is that there exists much variability even for a simple command. Worse, noise in speech recognition introduces additional variability. To address this challenge, we use webscale …