Sasha: creative goal-oriented reasoning in smart homes with large language models

Every smart home user interaction has an explicit or implicit goal. Existing home assistants easily achieve explicit goals, e.g., "turn on the light". In more natural communication, however, humans tend to describe implicit goals. We can, for example, ask someone to "make it cozy" rather than describe the specific steps involved. Current systems struggle with this ambiguity since it requires them to relate vague intent to specific devices. We approach this problem of flexibly achieving user goals from the perspective of general-purpose large language models (LLMs) trained on gigantic corpora and adapted to downstream tasks with remarkable flexibility. We explore the use of LLMs for controlling devices and creating automation routines to meet the implicit goals of user commands. In a user-focused study, we find that LLMs can reason creatively to achieve challenging goals, while also revealing gaps that diminish their usefulness. We address these gaps with Sasha: a system for creative, goal-oriented reasoning in smart homes. Sasha responds to commands like "make it cozy" or "help me sleep better" by executing plans to achieve user goals, e.g., setting a mood with available devices, or devising automation routines. We demonstrate Sasha in a real smart home.