Modifying Voice-User Interfaces for Resiliency and Offline Management of IoT Devices

Voice-user interfaces (VUIs) have gained popularity in recent years since these provide ease of access to users. The problem with current VUIs, however, is that they become unusable once Internet connection is cut off since processes such as speech-to-text decoding of commands and Internet of Things (IoT) management are implemented on cloud servers. This, however, does not necessarily have to be the case since there are commands, such as managing IoT devices like smart lights, smart thermostats, and smart locks, which do not need Internet connection for it to be executed. In this work, a proposal for a VUI which can determine when Internet connection is cut off and locally execute tasks which do not need information retrieval from the Internet, is presented. The proposed VUI runs 2 systems: the full system and the offline system. The full system is used when there is Internet connection while the offline system is used when Internet connection is cut off. Through experiments, the difference in performance between the two systems, along with the amount of time that should be given to the VUI as leeway in order for it to process all incoming voice inputs once it switches from the full system to the offline system and vice versa, were quantified.