  The current generation of streaming media players often allow users to speak
commands (e.g., users can change the TV channel by pressing a button and saying
"ESPN"). However, these devices typically support a narrow range of control-
and search-oriented commands, and do not support deeper recommendation or
exploration queries. To study spoken natural language interactions with
recommenders, we have built MovieLens TV, a movie recommender system with no
input modalities except voice. In this poster, we describe MovieLens TV, with a
focus on lessons learned building a prototype system around an off-the-shelf
Amazon Echo.
