Personal Assistants

assistant—they can make the arrangements. " Our business cards used to list only our phone numbers. When fax machines became popular, we added our fax numbers. Now, our business cards also carry our e-mail addresses and our home page URLs. What's next? It could be the network addresses of our personal assistants. These assistants will take care of our schedule and may even represent us in many situations. And with a good enough assistant, we might not need all those other numbers on our business cards. Already there are simple personal agents to help with some of our shopping (see, for example, Firefly, AgentSoft's Agent Builder, or CDnow's Album Advisor). There are agents to track stocks in our portfolios, advise us on how to use particular software products , and arrange meetings within corporate workgroups. However, none of these agents takes more than one aspect of our activities into account, nor do they adapt easily to our preferences. The Personal Assistant Advantage Personal assistants, on the other hand, are agents that can represent individuals on the Web. They help users in their day-today activities, especially those involving information retrieval, negotiation, or coordination. A personal assistant might schedule a meeting and then, based on the meeting location, find the nearest babysitting service or the ATM with the lowest transaction fee. A personal assistant differs from a personalized search program or e-mail filter in that it is inherently network-based, interactive, and adaptive. Personal assistant applications are also general-purpose and long-running. Recall that agents are autonomous, yet aware of and able to interact with other agents. They can perceive their environment, reason, and act. For personal assistants, the reasoning is about schedules, about user preferences and the preferences of other users' assistants , and about reputations. Thus personal assistants inevitably participate in a multiagent system. So what can personal assistants do? In addition to managing our personal calendars, they can communicate with other personal assistants to schedule telephone, video, or in-person conferences. They can find people to perform a needed service for us. For example, if we are traveling and need a dentist or physician, our assistants can help identify one. For people we already know, they can find the best time and means to contact them for a specified purpose. Our assistants can help us in buying or selling by gathering information about a particular market (such as local real estate) or …