A voice-controlled web browser to navigate hierarchical hidden menus of web pages in a smart-TV environment

Abstract

This paper proposes a new voice web browser that can be operated in smart TV environments. Previous voice web browsers had the limitation of being run under limited conditions; for example, a list of the specific contents of a page was outputted by voice, or the user entered a search term by voice. In our method proposed in this paper, all the hierarchical menu areas on a web page are recognized and controlled with voice keywords so that page navigation according to a menu can be conveniently done in a voice supported web browser. Although many studies have been conducted on web page menu recognition, most of them provide insufficient information to recognize the hierarchical menu structure. In other words, most web pages in recent browsers showed submenus only as a result of a specific user interaction, since these previous studies had no way of recognizing or controlling the submenus. Therefore, in the web browser proposed in this study, a hierarchical menu structure, which is inserted dynamically via user interaction, is recognized and selected by voice, thus making it possible to maneuver on the web page. Furthermore, the core code of the browser is implemented in JavaScript, so it can be flexibly used not only for a web browser on Smart TVs, but also as functional extensions of existing web browsers in a PC environment.