Papers about User Client Technology

A chatbot named Freudbot was constructed using the open source architecture of AIML to determine if a famous person application of chatbot technology could improve student-content interaction in distance education. Fifty-three students in psychology completed a study in which they chatted with Freudbot over the web for 10 minutes under one of two instructional sets. They then completed a questionnaire to provide information about their experience and demographic variables. The results from the questionnaire indicated... Read more

AIML - A recently developed standard for describing knowledge for Robots using XML data structures is introduced. A very large English-based robot knowledge base developed using the standard is described. Many other knowledge-based projects based on other international languages are described. The English-based knowledge base is currently interacting with people at a rate of 100,000 inquiries per day. A unique web-based computer architecture (http://www.pandorabots.com) supporting the on-going development of the knowledge base is described. The... Read more

Responsive Virtual Human Technology (RVHT) involves the use of natural language processing and an emotive behavioral engine to produce natural, interactive dialogues with intelligent, emotive virtual-reality (VR) agents. RVHT has great potential for use in training interaction skills, such as those required for effective survey interviewing. However, our understanding of how people interact with responsive virtual humans (a.k.a. intelligent agents) is quite limited. Better understanding requires employing RVHT in training applications and conducting systematic use,... Read more

The development of virtual agents running within graphic environments which emulate real-life contexts may largely benefit from the use of visual specification by-example. To support this specification, the development system must be able to interpret the examples and cast their underlying rules into an internal representation language. This language must find a suitable trade-off among a number of contrasting requirements regarding expressiveness, automatic executability, and suitability to the automatic representation of rules deriving from the... Read more

We present a deployed, conversational dialog system that assists users in finding computers based on their usage patterns and constraints on specifications. We discuss findings from a market survey and two user studies. We compared our system to a directed dialog system and a menu driven navigation system. We found that the conversational interface reduced the average number of clicks by 63% and the average interaction time by 33% over a menu driven search system.... Read more

Information dissemination is slowly moving from printed media to electronic media. However this step cannot be completed if the electronic commercialization of information does not provide the same guarantees against copyright infringement as the printed media. In this paper we present the major requirement for the commercialization of electronic information and describe Hypermedia Electronic Publishing (HEP), an agent-based framework we developed for the commercialization of arbitrary electronic documents. Read more

This paper unfolds the various aspects of ongoing evolution of Intelligent User Interfaces. It provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the field. Read more

In this article I describe some of the features of human-human conversation that are being implemented in this new genre of embodied conversational agents. Then I describe an embodied conversational agent that is based on these features. I argue that, because conversation is such a primary skill for humans, and such an early-learned skill (practiced, in fact, between infants and mothers who take turns cooing and burbling at one another), and because the body is... Read more