Towards True Artificial Peers

While the original aim of assistant systems is the reduction of the workload of their user, this is often not the result within state-of-the-art systems. One reason is that the current generation of assistant systems tends to be used as user interfaces for information accessing and as pre-planned control systems for external applications. Most of these are based on a straightforward control from their user or leave the responsibility of the user decision in the hand of the user, which in turn requires a constant supervision to assure a flawless execution. As this goes contrary to the idea of taking workload from a user and limits the general potential of research for artificial intelligence towards an incremental advancement of interpreting the user, we propose a different approach for an integrated human-machine interaction. In our approach we supply the machine part with the ability to generate their own aims and resolution steps, constrained by general and specific rules concerning the particular task of the system. While using the capabilities of cognitive architectures, similar to the way humans process information, we propose that machines could interact with, and independently side by side to their user in a fully integrated human-machine environment. With the added advantage of, for example, greater independence from constant supervision, the ability to generate new solution steps and to adapt to new problems arises. By combining the two concepts of assistant systems and cognitive architectures, we can create a system which is capable of seamless human-machine interaction and integration, like a peer to their user instead of a servant or a simple assistant.