Operating networked appliances using gaze information and voice recognition

In the emerging home network systems (HNS), household appliances and sensors are connected to the network to provide various value-added services. However, the cost taken for users to operate the HNS would increase significantly, due to the diversification of appliances and services. Thus, intuitive and simple human interfaces are strongly required. This paper presents a method that operates the networked appliances using user’s voice and gaze information together. The conventional voice command interface cannot achieve high precision, when the number of target operations is large. Therefore, the gaze information is used to reduce the number of operations, so that the system handles only appliances that the user is currently gazing at. We have implemented the proposed method and evaluated its effectiveness.