A collaborative assistant for email

ABSTRACT

Software agents which communicate and collaborate with users to perform complex tasks constitute a new paradigm for human-computer interaction complementing existing graphical interfaces. We have recently completed a prototype agent of this kind for helping people with their email, based on our studies of people working with human assistants and Wizard-of-Oz studies. The prototype was constructed using application-independent software for modeling collaborative discourse (Collagen, see [4]) jointly developed by Lotus and Mitsubishi Electric and speech understanding technology from IBM Research. Users perform typical email tasks via a flexible combination of spoken language conversation with the agent and graphical interface actions (which are observed by the agent). The agent maintains a model of the user's goals and activities, and can act on its own initiative to assist the user. Having a high-level model of actions and goals allows speech to be used in a more natural, conversational, and effective manner than otherwise possible.

REFERENCES

• 1: James F. Allen , Bradford W. Miller , Eric K. Ringger , Teresa Sikorski, A robust system for natural spoken dialogue, Proceedings of the 34th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, p.62-70, June 24-27, 1996, Santa Cruz, California [doi>10.3115/981863.981872]
• 2: Chung. G. And Seneff, S. "Improvements in Speech Understanding Accuracy through the Integration of Hierarchical Linguistic, Prosodic, and Phonological Constraints in the Jupiter Domain" ICSLP 98, Sydney, Australia, November 1998.
• 3: Lesh, N. Rich, C. & Sidner, C. Using Plan Recognition in Human-Computer Collaboration, Lotus TR 98-14, 1998
• 4: Charles Rich , Candace L. Sidner, COLLAGEN: A Collaboration Manager for Software Interface Agents, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, v.8 n.3-4, p.315-350, 1998 [doi>10.1023/A:1008204020038]
• 5: Nicole Yankelovich , Gina-Anne Levow , Matt Marx, Designing SpeechActs: issues in speech user interfaces, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.369-376, May 07-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado, United States [doi>10.1145/223904.223952]

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
agent, calendar, collaboration, conversation, email, speech