Commonly, people use schedule books,
personal digital assistants, or scheduling software to organize their time and
tasks. Unfortunately, we still have trouble scheduling events and finding
people. In fact, one of the difficulties of working with other people is to
know when it is appropriate to intrude on their space. The office threshold is
a social demarcation, the separation of private and public space. It is where
we obtain subtle information about someone's availability or their willingness
to be interrupted. Its role also changes depending on the relationship between
the office owner and the visitor. This work extends other scheduling metaphors
by making an assistant agent, which is human-like and able to have simple
conversations, interact with visitors at the threshold.
Office Assistant is an agent that interacts with visitors at the office
door and manages the office owner's schedule. The agent is installed at the
threshold of a high-traffic office in a noisy environment where the office
owner prefers to have the door closed. The agent's goal is to facilitate
informal, everyday office communication in an unobtrusive manner. One of the
primary tasks of the office assistant agent is to interact with visitors, give
them proper information about their appointments or instructions to set up
appointments, and update calendar entries to reflect recent interactions. The
agent can also access and manage the office owner's schedule. For example, if
the owner is in a conversation with another person when a visitor comes to the
threshold, the agent will decide whether to interrupt according to whether the
visitor has an appointment with the owner.
The Office Assistant is able to create adaptive user and task models based
on information from the office owner, visitors, and the interaction history,
and thus change its interaction behavior. It uses different technologies to
collect context information, such as whether the owner is busy, whether there
is a person arriving or leaving, the owner's available time slots, the
visitor's identity, etc.
To see a demo of how it works, download and play this mpeg video: officeassistant.mpg
(~62MB)
