Contrary to expectations of a few years ago, voice mail or voice messaging technology has rapidly outpaced speech recognition and speech synthesis in applications for office automation. This growth is a result of rapid technological advances in such areas as computing technology and digital telephony. The falling cost of voice message storage, the power of computer control of messaging, and use...

Office automation requires controlled coordination between information management and collaborative problem solving. Often, this entails the cooperation of agents executing diverse tasks in an office environment. Designing cooperating agents for office automation, however, is non-trivial: issues such as agent heterogeneity, communication protocols, context sensitivity, task coordination, and co...