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arXiv · 2602.15707

Proactive Conversational Assistant for a Procedural Manual Task based on Audio and IMU

Rehana Mahfuz·Yinyi Guo·Erik Visser·Phanidhar Chinchili
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Abstract

Real-time conversational assistants for procedural manual tasks often depend on video input, which can be computationally expensive and compromise user privacy. For the first time, we propose a real-time conversational assistant that provides comprehensive guidance for procedural manual tasks using only lightweight privacy-preserving modalities such as audio and IMU inputs from a user's wearable device to understand the context. Using a furniture assembly task and a cooking task, we show how this assistant proactively communicates step-by-step instructions to a user performing a procedural task, and answers user questions. We illustrate the data generation method and the system design to achieve such an assistant. On observing that an off-the-shelf language model is a talkative assistant but is not always able to answer questions correctly, we demonstrate how finetuning the model improves its ability to limit unnecessary dialogues with a 50% increase in the precision, while also improving its ability to answer questions correctly, measured by a 150% increase in the recall of answers. We further describe how such an assistant is implemented on an edge device with no dependence on the cloud.

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Rehana Mahfuz, Yinyi Guo, Erik Visser, Phanidhar Chinchili. 2026-02-17. Proactive Conversational Assistant for a Procedural Manual Task based on Audio and IMU. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15707

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