WearWrite

Abstract

The physical constraints of smartwatches limit the range and complexity of tasks that can be completed. Despite interface improvements on smartwatches, the promise of enabling pro ductive work remains largely unrealized. This paper presents WearWrite, a system that enables users to write documents from their smartwatches by leveraging a crowd to help trans late their ideas into text. WearWrite users dictate tasks, re spond to questions, and receive notifications of major edits on their watch. Using a dynamic task queue, the crowd re ceives tasks issued by the watch user and generic tasks from the system. In a week-long study with seven smartwatch users supported by approximately 29 crowd workers each, we val idate that it is possible to manage the crowd writing process from a watch. Watch users captured new ideas as they came to mind and managed a crowd during spare moments while go ing about their daily routine. WearWrite represents a new ap proach to getting work done from wearables using the crowd.

InstructableCrowd: Creating IF-THEN Rules for Smartphones via Conversations with the Crowd

“…In prior projects within this theme, crowd-powered systems have not always performed better than users. In WearWrite (Nebeling et al, 2016), Chorus (Lasecki et al, 2013b), and Knowledge Accelerator Chang et al, 2016), the proposed solutions did not necessarily produce results that were faster or of higher quality than traditional methods. The value of these projects was opening up new possibilities of completing tasks in ways that were not possible before, especially with respect to flexibility.…”

Foldwatch

“…Text-entry for smartwatches is a challenge due to the small screen size, and research has examined novel screen keyboards such as Fleksy and Swype [5], by optimising the text layout [6], but also whether voice could be used instead of keyboards, e.g. WearWrite [34]. There has also been an investigation of miniature QWERTY keyboards with zoom function to assist in typing on smartwatches [29], amongst other proof-of-concept studies for text entry interaction.…”

Flash Organizations

“…Some even enable collaborative, decentralized coordination instead of step-by-step instructions [46,86]. As the area advanced, it began to make progress in achieving significantly more complex and interdependent goals [43], such as knowledge aggregation [30], writing [43,61,78], ideation [84,85], clustering [12], and programming [11,50].…”

“…Recent work instead sought to achieve complex goals by moving from microtask workers to expert workers. Such systems now support user interface prototyping [70], questionanswering and debugging for software engineers [11,22,50], worker management [28,45], remote writing tasks [61], and skill training [77]. For example, flash teams demonstrated that expert workflows can achieve far more complex goals than can be accomplished using microtask workflows [70].…”