LiveAction: Automating Web Task Model Generation

Task automation systems promise to increase human productivity by assisting us with our mundane and difficult tasks. These systems often rely on people to (1) identify the tasks they want automated and (2) specify the procedural steps necessary to accomplish those tasks (i.e., to create task models). However, our interviews with users of a Web task automation system reveal that people find it difficult to identify tasks to automate and most do not even believe they perform repetitive tasks worthy of automation. Furthermore, even when automatable tasks are identified, the well-recognized difficulties of specifying task steps often prevent people from taking advantage of these automation systems. In this research, we analyze real Web usage data and find that people do in fact repeat behaviors on the Web and that automating these behaviors, regardless of their complexity, would reduce the overall number of actions people need to perform when completing their tasks, potentially saving time. Motivated by these findings, we developed LiveAction, a fully-automated approach to generating task models from Web usage data. LiveAction models can be used to populate the task model repositories required by many automation systems, helping us take advantage of automation in our everyday lives.