Full Paper

Automating tasks can make a smartphone easier to use and more battery efficient. However, currently little work has been done to help end-users to create such automations. In this paper, we explore an approach for automating smartphone tasks by demonstration. We have developed a mobile application called Keep Doing It that continuously records users’ interactions with their smartphones. After users performed a task that they would like to automate, they can ask our application to create the automation based on their latest actions. Since users only have to use their smartphones, as they would naturally do, to demonstrate automations, we believe that our approach can lower the barrier for creating smartphone automations. Overall, an initial evaluation of the approach suggests that users would be willing to automate their phones by demonstration.