Firefox Voice: An Open and Extensible Voice Assistant Built Upon the Web Julia Cambre Alex C. Williams Afsaneh Razi
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Carnegie Mellon University University of Tennessee, Knoxville University of Central Florida Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Knoxville, Tennessee, USA Orlando, Florida, USA Ian Bicking Abraham Wallin Janice Tsai
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Mozilla Mozilla Mozilla Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA San Francisco, California, USA Seattle, Washington, USA Chinmay Kulkarni Jofish Kaye
[email protected] [email protected] Carnegie Mellon University Mozilla Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Mountain View, California, USA ABSTRACT 1 INTRODUCTION Voice assistants are fundamentally changing the way we access Over the last decade, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google information. However, voice assistants still leverage little about the Assistant, and Apple’s Siri have gained widespread adoption, with web beyond simple search results. We introduce Firefox Voice, a over 50% of adults in the United States reporting that they use have novel voice assistant built on the open web ecosystem with an aim used a voice assistant [52]. While the embodiments of voice assis- to expand access to information available via voice. Firefox Voice is tants and the reasons for their adoption are wide-ranging, their a browser extension that enables users to use their voice to perform usage shows a consistent pattern: across several studies, searching actions such as setting timers, navigating the web, and reading a the web for content like music and recipes and performing simple webpage’s content aloud. Through an iterative development process informational queries consistently ranks among the most frequent and use by over 12,000 active users, we find that users see voice as use-cases for voice assistants [3, 64].