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NetButler: Voice-Based Edge/Cloud Virtual Assistant for Home Network Management

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Science and Technologies for Smart Cities (SmartCity360° 2020)

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Abstract

Virtual assistants (VA) are becoming a standard tool in many aspects of our daily lives that require technical support. Voice-based VAs in particular, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, have become common in smart phones and domestic IoT devices (e.g., Google Home, Amazon Echo), replying to user inquiries (e.g., weather forecast) or performing simple services (e.g., play music). Through dedicated interfaces, VAs can be used or extended to support new services, and one particular area typically requiring assistance is the management of home networks. Activating specific features or troubleshooting connectivity problems may be difficult or impossible for users that are not tech-savvy. In this paper we introduce NetButler, a voice-based virtual assistant tailored to support the management of home networks, that leverages a third-party cloud-based voice service (Alexa) and dedicated routines at the home gateway. Offered functionalities are the setup of a guest network and diagnosis of connectivity problems, by quantifying the signal strength of the devices in the local network and performing a throughput test to an external server. We evaluate the user experience with the NetButler system with 8 test users. We report an average of up to 15 s to set up a guest network and between 30 to 60 s to diagnose various problems, and we find overall user satisfaction to be 3.75 in a 1-to-5 scale by means of a after-interaction questionnaire.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://mycroft.ai/.

  2. 2.

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  3. 3.

    https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306.

  4. 4.

    https://developer.amazon.com/en-GB/alexa/alexa-skills-kit.

  5. 5.

    https://www.jovo.tech.

  6. 6.

    https://www.npmjs.com/package/mqtt.

  7. 7.

    https://openwrt.org/.

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli.

  9. 9.

    https://github.com/collin5/python-n2w.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by National Funds through FCT/MCTES (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology), within the CISTER Research Unit (UIDB/04234/2020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Engenharia, Porto, Portugal

    Diogo Martins & Pedro M. Santos

  2. Altran Portugal, Porto, Portugal

    Diogo Martins, Bruno Parreira & Sérgio Figueiredo

  3. CISTER Research Center, Instituto Politécnico do Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Pedro M. Santos

Authors
  1. Diogo Martins
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  2. Bruno Parreira
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  3. Pedro M. Santos
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  4. Sérgio Figueiredo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pedro M. Santos .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Technology and Management, Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão, VIANA DO CASTELO, Portugal

    Sara Paiva

  2. Polytechnic Institute of Viana do Castel, Viana do Castelo, Portugal

    Sérgio Ivan Lopes

  3. SIC Laboratory, INSEEC U, ECE Paris Graduate School of Engineering, PARIS, France

    Rafik Zitouni

  4. Vaagdevi College of Engineering, Telangana, India

    Nishu Gupta

  5. University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal

    Sérgio F. Lopes

  6. Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

    Takuro Yonezawa

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Martins, D., Parreira, B., Santos, P.M., Figueiredo, S. (2021). NetButler: Voice-Based Edge/Cloud Virtual Assistant for Home Network Management. In: Paiva, S., Lopes, S.I., Zitouni, R., Gupta, N., Lopes, S.F., Yonezawa, T. (eds) Science and Technologies for Smart Cities. SmartCity360° 2020. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 372. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76063-2_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76063-2_17

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-76062-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-76063-2

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