# TextOnly: A Unified Function Portal for Text-Related Functions on Smartphones

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16926 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16926/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and Improving Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05176/) (2023)
- [Visual ChatGPT: Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04671/) (2023)
- [Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03776/) (2020)
- [A data-driven approach for learning to control computers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08137/) (2022)
- [Learning to Navigate the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09195/) (2018)
- [Smartphone App Usage Prediction Using Points of Interest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09337/) (2017)
- [Context-Aware Target Apps Selection and Recommendation for Enhancing Personal Mobile Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03394/) (2021)
- [Target Apps Selection: Towards a Unified Search Framework for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.02211/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text boxes serve as portals to diverse functionalities in today's smartphone applications. However, when it comes to specific functionalities, users always need to navigate through multiple steps to access particular text boxes for input. We propose TextOnly, a unified function portal that enables users to access text-related functions from various applications by simply inputting text into a sole text box. For instance, entering a restaurant name could trigger a Google Maps search, while a greeting could initiate a conversation in WhatsApp. Despite their brevity, TextOnly maximizes the utilization of these raw text inputs, which contain rich information, to interpret user intentions effectively. TextOnly integrates large language models(LLM) and a BERT model. The LLM consistently provides general knowledge, while the BERT model can continuously learn user-specific preferences and enable quicker predictions. Real-world user studies demonstrated TextOnly's effectiveness with a top-1 accuracy of 71.35%, and its ability to continuously improve both its accuracy and inference speed. Participants perceived TextOnly as having satisfactory usability and expressed a preference for TextOnly over manual executions. Compared with voice assistants, TextOnly supports a greater range of text-related functions and allows for more concise inputs.