2000 Papers

This article describes Artificial Life, Inc.’s WebGuide, an intelligent software bot that helps users navigate a Web site using natural language. The article describes the technology behind ALife-WebGuide, discusses some of the issues involved in commercialization of this type of user interface, and summarizes possible enhancements for future versions of this product. 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

Project COGITO aims at an agent-based interface for B-to-C applications that is not merely re-active to some user request, but pro-active and capable of engaging in a goal-directed conversation with the user, e.g., by taking the initiative to recommend new products. The approach combines content-based filtering, where user profiles are generated based on content features extracted from documents that users find relevant, with collaborative filtering which clusters users according to their... Read more

This paper discusses pedagogical issues for intelligent agents to successfully serve as mentors for educational purposes. Broader issues about the nature or persona necessary for an intelligent agent as mentor are discussed, incorporating usability and human-computer interaction issues such as the anthropomorphic qualities of the agent and the social relationship between learner and agent. Overall, to be effective for learning, it is argued that there are three main requirements for agents as mentors: 1) regulated... Read more

Social dialogue can be used by an embodied interface agent both to satisfy "interpersonal" goals, such as building rapport with the user and demonstrating the expertise of the agent, and to directly or indirectly satisfy task goals, such as acquiring background information about the user. We describe the ongoing development of an embodied conversational agent that is capable of multimodal input understanding and output generation and operates in a limited application domain in which both... Read more

This research investigates design guidelines to assist in choosing the appropriate conversational agents to act as assistants in interactive e-commerce applications. The first experiment evaluated the effectiveness and user acceptability of human-like agents in an electronic retail application. The second evaluated the same cast of agents in another application to explore application dependency effects on the users’ attitudes toward the cast of agents. The third experiment evaluated a cast of cartoon-like humanoid agents in an... Read more

This paper presents the results of an empirical evaluation of the effectiveness and user acceptability of a selection of animated agents in a multi-modal electronic retail application. Male and female versions of six animated agent technologies were repeatedly evaluated in the role of an interactive conversational sales assistant. The experiment involved participants eavesdropping on spoken dialogues between a ’customer’and each of the animated assistants. Participants then completed usability questionnaires and took part in a debriefing interview designed... Read more

Reearch into virtual environments on the one hand and artificial intelligence and artificial life on the other has largely been carried out by two different groups of people with different preoccupations and interests, but some convergence is now apparent between the two fields. Applications in which activity independent of the user takes place — involving crowds or other agents — are beginning to be tackled, while synthetic agents, virtual humans and computer pets are all areas... Read more

The design of embodied conversational agents puts many demands on system architecture. Therefore, we describe a conversational framework expressed as a list of conversational properties and abilities and then demonstrate how it can lead to a set of architectural design constraints. We describe an architecture that meets the constraints, and an implementation of the architecture that therefore exhibits many of the properties and abilities required for real-time natural conversation. We are currently developing an embodied conversational... 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