Engineering Personal Service Assistants with Lifelike Qualities

The shift towards highly personalised interfaces in which communication between user and computer is mediated by lifelike agents is currently one of the major steps in the evolution of the user interface technology. Anthropomorphizing the Personal Service Assistant, hence, constitutes an important aspect of current interface-agent research aiming towards highly personalised services. Our research aims at developing and evaluating such intuitive social user interfaces that deploy animated characters to interact with users in natural multi-modal communication dialogue. Personifying the PSA in a context generated emotion-based character is an additional dimension to providing personalised services. The motivation for this type of personalisation is that an animated figure (eliciting human-like communication capabilities) may add an expressive dimension to the PSA’s communicative features that can further add to the effectiveness and personalisation of the interface and the application on the whole. We discuss the experience gained from using the PSA in the KIMSAC project, providing an analysis of the metaphor and its implementation requirements. The paper concentrates on describing a base-system for supporting PSA development and considers how this can be expanded to support a richer set of social features that would form an infrastructure for developing Personal Service Assistants with life-like qualities. We further brief on experimental scenarios to evaluate the effect of emotional personality-based behaviour on interactive user interfaces as well as on other service agents in a multi-agent environment.