Intelligent User Interfaces - Latest Commercial Developments

 Among the winners of the first ITEA competition (Information Technology European Awards '95) organized by the ESPRIT program jointly with Euro-CASE, the European Council of Applied Sciences and Engineering, also one innovative intelligent user interface product can be found. WIP is a knowledge-based software tool for automating the design of multimedia presentations which has been developed by DFKI GmbH. This advanced multimedia authoring tool generates interactive and coordinated presentations combining text, graphics, animation and speech. In contrast to conventional hypermedia-based approaches, WIP does not use any canned texts or graphics. That is, each multimedia presentation is designed from scratch using common-sense design knowledge represented in the WIP software package. WIP has already been successfully deployed for the automatic generation of technical documentation, the constraint-based layout of complex directories, and the generation of on-line help systems.

The academic research activities in the area of anthropomorphic interface agents have already led to new comercial developments. The Persona project at Microsoft Research is working on the technologies required to produce conversational assistants, i.e. lifelike animated characters that interact with a user in a natural spoken dialogue. The prototype system integrates spoken language input, a simple conversational dialogue manager, reactive 3D animation, speech output and sound effects to create Peedy the Parrot, a conversational assistant who accepts user requests for audio CDs and then plays them.

(New Nov. 96) A new product from Microsoft Corp. provides support for more advanced user interfaces relying on interface agents. Microsoft Agent is a set of software services that supports the presentation of user controlled applications as interactive personalities within the Microsoft Windows interface. These interface agents are meant as an extension and enhancement of the existing interactive modalities of an application's conventional graphical user interface. Character-based interaction can be blended with the conventional interface components such as windows, menus, and controls. In addition to providing animation services for the cartoon-style drawings, Microsoft Agent supports input using keyboard and mouse as well as speech interfaces.

(New June 98) XML, the Extensible Markup Language (see XML [1998]), is a new W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standard to be used as a system for defining, validating, and sharing document formats on the World-Wide Web. XML provides a common syntax for expressing structure in data and allows the flexible definition of new document formats, i.e. languages for data representation, that are specifically suited for a particular class of applications. The term structured data refers here to data that is tagged for its content, meaning, or use. With XML structure and content are separated from presentation. Hence the same XML source document could be displayed in a variety of ways depending on the current context of use. In essence, the adoption of XML will make networked information easier to find, categorize, and customize. This promises interesting perspectives for the deployment of intelligent user interfaces, especially for applications where intelligent Web agents seek to discover information to meet customized profiles defined by individual users. In current HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) all users see a single data set the same way. Using XML, much more meta-information concerning the data is provided and each user might see a single data set in his or her own unique way.

SMIL, the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (see SMIL [1998]), constitutes another important W3C standard. SMIL is an XML application for synchronizing television-like audio and video with text and animation. It can be expected that this new representation format will also have an important influence on future software solutions for multimedia information presentation within intelligent user interfaces.

(New Sep. 98) Perspecta, Inc. , based in San Francisco (USA), is offering a novel product family that is designed to organize, structure and present information dynamically on the World-wide Web. The products provide a framework for building intelligent user interfaces that serve as a sort of virtual domain expert for a given corporate database of information such that database content is quickly and efficiently served to the end user. The Perspecta system is a client-server architecture composed of several products. PSCS , the Perspecta SmartContent Server, is a scalable server engine that dynamically organizes and delivers database content over the Web using knowledge-based, statistical and linguistic techniques. The SmartContent Delivery SDK is a separate software development kit which includes a rich layer of Java application programming interfaces. These APIs enable Web site designers to implement effective HTML delivery frontends to the backend database. A third component is the Perspecta SmartContent Editor , a full-featured graphical product that allows users to rapidly organize their databases through the use of metadata hierarchies. Through this tool, administrators can easily define and structure the information space contained in their databases, thus allowing the Perspecta SmartContent server and client to effectively deliver this information to the end user.

(New Nov. 98) Richardson, Texas-based 7th Level, Inc. offers a powerful and low-cost character animation software called Agent 7. This product constitutes a new kind of voice activated, internet software for making and running broadcast quality, lip-synched, re-usable animation on the Web as well as from within major desktop applications for word processing or slide-show presentation like Microsoft Word and Powerpoint.
Characters can be choreographed and lip-synchronized in a matter of minutes to create an unlimited number of animated characters. Users can change a character's dialog by recording a new voice track with a microphone plugged into a PC. The software lets users select from a cast of characters created by 7th Level and insert animation into other programs. Such characters can also serve as automated attendants guiding Web site visitors through an information search or an electronic commerce transaction.
Available Agent 7 characters feature a wide variety of styles, including 2D animation, 3D animation and photo-montage. Each character within the growing set of components is uniquely styled and designed to suit a particular e-business application, ranging from advertising, marketing, customer support and entertainment, to news, information, retail service and training.
According to 7th Level , Agent 7 aims to provide consumer and professional Web and presentation developers with key benefits to increase the effectiveness and reduce the time and cost of developing and updating Web pages and presentations. The Agent 7 product itself is based on 7th Level 's core technology Media Control 7 which can be used to control, manipulate and publish multiple sources of streaming media on the Internet, other narrow and broadband networks, or standalone PCs.

(New Feb. 99) Boston-based Artificial Life, Inc. is a new software company which develops, markets and supports intelligent software robots that automate and simplify certain business-related Internet functions. The so-called ALife-SmartEngine technology is the core component that gives Artificial Life products the expertise to communicate with users in natural languge text or speech. The softbots are designed so that users, especially corporations, can adapt them to their own applications' needs by adding user or company specific knowledge and by customizing the softbots.
Artificial Life 's product line comprises several intelligent software robots. ALife-WebGuide is designed to reside on a WWW site and help users to navigate. Using natural language conversation the softbot tries to match the interest of the visitor with relevant information and Web content. ALife-Knowledge-Manager is being designed to extract information embedded in a company's intranet documents and enables easy retrieval of natural language requests. ALife-Messenger acts as a natural language-based automated email reply and answering service. The ALife-Call-Center-Agent can be used by call centers and help desks as a component that integrates with pre-existing call center software. Based on natural language processing it provides an automated first response to incoming voice telephone calls or email requests, handling basic call center tasks with virtually no aid from human operators. ALife-SalesRep with its very advanced avatar based intelligent user interface is being developed for electronic commerce retailers to use for direct marketing on the Internet. ALife-Personal-Tutor is a natural language based tutoring program being developed to automatically adapt the difficulty and content of lessons to the skill level of the student which is dynamically analyzed using the natural language conversations between softbot and student user. ALife-Portfolio-Manager monitors an individual's investment portfolio according to concerns and criteria specified. When certain triggers are activated, it autonomously contacts the individual by telephone, pager, email or other means and alerts that trading actions might be warranted.