A collaborative assistant for email

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.