Mobile personal information management agent: Supporting natural language interface and application integration

Managing personal information such as to-dos and contacts has become our daily routines, consuming more time than needed. Existing PIM tools require extensive involvement of human users. This becomes a problem in using mobile devices due to their physical constraints. To address the limitations of traditional PIM tools, we propose a model of mobile PIM agent (PIMA) that aims to improve PIM on mobile devices through natural language interface and application integration. We conducted a user study to evaluate PIMA empirically with prototype systems. The results show that mobile PIMA improved perceived usefulness, ease-of-use, and efficiency of PIM on mobile devices, which in turn accounted for positive attitude and intention to use the system. The findings of this study provide suggestions for designing and developing PIM applications on mobile devices.

► Personal information management agent (PIMA) interprets user inputs in natural language.
► PIMA matches the application to a user PIM request.
► A PIMA prototype was implemented and evaluated empirically with a user study.
► Empirical results show that PIMA improves user task performance and perception.
► The findings provide suggestions for the design of PIM system for hand-held devices.