Learn Sesame, a Learning Agent Engine

Open Sesame!® 1.0—released in 1993—was the world’s first commercial user interface (UI) learning agent. The development of this agent involved a number of decisions about basic design issues that had not been previously addressed, including the expected types of agent and the preferred form and frequency of interaction. In the two years after shipping Open Sesame! 1.0, we have compiled a rich database of customer feedback. Many of our design choices have been validated by the general approval of our customers while some were not received as favorably. Thanks to the overwhelming amount of feedback, we were able to substantially improve the design for Open Sesame! 2.0, and develop a cross-platform learning engine Learn Sesamethat can be used to add learning agent functionality to any third party application. In this paper, we present a summary of the lessons learned from customer feedback, an outline of resulting design changes, the details of the developed learning agent engine and planned research.