Enhancing the interaction between agents and users

Abstract

A key aspect when interface agents provide personalized assistance to users, is knowing not only a user's preferences and interests with respect to a software application but also when and how the user prefers to be assisted. To achieve this goal, interface agents have to detect the user's intention to determine when to assist the user, and the user's interaction and interruption preferences to provide the right type of assistance at the right time. In this work we describe a user profiling approach that considers these issues within a user profile, which enables the agent to choose the best type of assistance for a given user in a given situation. We also describe the results obtained when evaluating our proposal in a calendar application. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.