Ubiquity, an IF-inspired approach to a command-line interface
Atul Varma
Aside from Parchment, one of the things I've been working on lately
with some colleagues and community members is an open-source Firefox
extension called Ubiquity. A good description of its basics can be
found here:
"Make the Web Do Your Bidding With Firefox's New Ubiquity UI"
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Make_the_Web_Do_Your_Bidding_With_Firefox_s_New_Ubiquity_UI
We've basically taken a lot of inspiration from the way interactive
fiction allows one to easily "type what they want to do" and put it in
a different context. One interesting thing you can do, for instance,
is refer to your current selection as "this", "it", "him", "her",
etc.: selecting some text and typing "email this to bob", will send
your selection to someone named bob in your address book. Jono
DiCarlo, the core developer behind all this natural-language stuff,
recently made an interesting blog post about the addition of synonyms
to Ubiquity, with references to Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy:
http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/the-synonym-problem/
So while this project isn't exactly IF, since it's heavily inspired by
it, I thought some of you might be interested.
- Atul
Ron Newcomb
> Hi everyone,
>
> Aside from Parchment, one of the things I've been working on lately
> with some colleagues and community members is an open-source Firefox
> extension called Ubiquity. A good description of its basics can be
> found here:
>
> "Make the Web Do Your Bidding With Firefox's New Ubiquity UI"
>
> We've basically taken a lot of inspiration from the way interactive
> fiction allows one to easily "type what they want to do" and put it in
> a different context. One interesting thing you can do, for instance,
> is refer to your current selection as "this", "it", "him", "her",
> etc.: selecting some text and typing "email this to bob", will send
> your selection to someone named bob in your address book. Jono
> DiCarlo, the core developer behind all this natural-language stuff,
> recently made an interesting blog post about the addition of synonyms
> to Ubiquity, with references to Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the
> Galaxy:
>
> http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/the-synonym-problem/
>
> So while this project isn't exactly IF, since it's heavily inspired by
> it, I thought some of you might be interested.
>
> - Atul
I think vision-impaired users might also be interested. As I
understand it, navigating a unknown website full of graphical widgets
is very frustrating for them. Can commands to list the sections of a
site, READ one out loud, etc. be added?
-R
Atul Varma
tutorial on our wiki page can get you started on writing commands, if
you're interested:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity
- Atul
Samuel Verschelde
It may be too early to ask that, but do you already plan to support multiple
languages ? It may require some abstraction of concepts in order to easy
the translation to another language than english.
Regards
Samuel Verschelde
Atul Varma
Jono actually had this same concern--that is, he wanted to be certain
that a user interface relying so much on natural language was portable
to other languages. Fortunately, Jono's also fluent in Japanese, so
he made a localization. I'd like to find a link to a wiki page
describing this in more detail, but I'm not sure if one's been written
yet; I'll ask Jono next time I see him and post any further follow-up
here.
- Atul
On Sep 17, 12:55 am, Samuel Verschelde <stormi-use...@laposte.net>
wrote:
david...@gmail.com
> Hi everyone,
>
> Aside from Parchment, one of the things I've been working on lately
> with some colleagues and community members is an open-source Firefox
> extension called Ubiquity. A good description of its basics can be
> found here:
>
> "Make the Web Do Your Bidding With Firefox's New Ubiquity UI"
>
> We've basically taken a lot of inspiration from the way interactive
> fiction allows one to easily "type what they want to do" and put it in
> a different context. One interesting thing you can do, for instance,
> is refer to your current selection as "this", "it", "him", "her",
> etc.: selecting some text and typing "email this to bob", will send
> your selection to someone named bob in your address book. Jono
> DiCarlo, the core developer behind all this natural-language stuff,
> recently made an interesting blog post about the addition of synonyms
> to Ubiquity, with references to Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the
> Galaxy:
>
> http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/the-synonym-problem/
>
> So while this project isn't exactly IF, since it's heavily inspired by
> it, I thought some of you might be interested.
>
> - Atul
Would it be possible, I wonder, to implement an even more NL-like
interface?
"Make a TinyURL for the web address http://www.example.com"
would be equivalent to "tinyurl http://www.example.com/"
They could do things similar to how I7 parses "Understand" statements:
Understand "Make a TinyURL from [one of]the URL[or]the web
address[end one of] [a URL preferably http]"
etc.
-- David
Atul Varma
This is actually something we briefly looked into a few months ago,
but we ran into a few roadblocks; for one, at the time, the source
code for I7 wasn't available, so we couldn't poke at it to see how it
was implemented, and the one lead we had found to something similar--
SHRDLU--was fairly complex to comprehend. Aside from that, though,
there were also a few issues in regards to how IF parses sentences
versus Ubiquity: the former, as far as I know, doesn't assist you
while you're in the process of typing your commands, and it also
regards ambiguity as an exceptional condition. Ubiquity, on the other
hand, is constantly trying to offer suggestions to the user while they
type--something that puzzle-oriented IF may not even want to do--and
it also regards ambiguity as non-exceptional (two different
interpretations of the same sentence are both given to the user as
suggestions). So we'll have to reconcile those with any details of
the actual algorithm that I7 is using.
Aside from that, though, I definitely agree that an even more NL-like
interface--including an even more NL-like way of defining verbs--would
be quite welcome. If you or anyone else here is interested in
exploring this, by the way, please don't hesitate to let us know. :)
- Atul
On Sep 18, 4:55 am, davidpk...@gmail.com wrote:
> Would it be possible, I wonder, to implement an even more NL-like
> interface?
>
> "Make a TinyURL for the web addresshttp://www.example.com"
>
> would be equivalent to "tinyurlhttp://www.example.com/"
Atul Varma
This is actually something we briefly looked into a few months ago,
but we ran into a few roadblocks; for one, at the time, the source
code for I7 wasn't available, so we couldn't poke at it to see how it
was implemented, and the one lead we had found to something similar--
SHRDLU--was fairly complex to comprehend. Aside from that, though,
there were also a few issues in regards to how IF parses sentences
versus Ubiquity: the former, as far as I know, doesn't assist you
while you're in the process of typing your commands, and it also
regards ambiguity as an exceptional condition. Ubiquity, on the other
hand, is constantly trying to offer suggestions to the user while they
type--something that puzzle-oriented IF may not even want to do--and
it also regards ambiguity as non-exceptional (two different
interpretations of the same sentence are both given to the user as
suggestions). So we'll have to reconcile those with any details of
the actual algorithm that I7 is using.
Aside from that, though, I definitely agree that an even more NL-like
interface--including an even more NL-like way of defining verbs--would
be quite welcome. If you or anyone else here is interested in
exploring this, by the way, please don't hesitate to let us know. :)
- Atul
On Sep 18, 4:55 am, davidpk...@gmail.com wrote:
> Would it be possible, I wonder, to implement an even more NL-like
> interface?
>
> "Make a TinyURL for the web addresshttp://www.example.com"
>
> would be equivalent to "tinyurlhttp://www.example.com/"