Anthropomorphic UI AgentsJun XiaoJohn Stasko Richard Catrambone |
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Anthropomorphic UI AgentsJun XiaoJohn Stasko Richard Catrambone |
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| Agent-based interfaces, particularly those with anthropomorphic appearance, promise a new paradigm for user interfaces. The traditional view of computers as a tool for functional purposes is challenged by human-like assistants that answer questions and perform tasks through conversational, natural language-style dialogs with users. However, although such assistants have been developed in many applications, little careful empirical evaluation on anthropomorphic interfaces is actually being performed, and the results from this research have been contradictory or equivocal. The goal of our research is to gather a set of experimental data in order to understand the conditions under which users could best benefit from such social interaction. Our particular foci are two: evaluating this style of interface for its utility/usability and examining ways to build toolkit for such interface. The very long term goal is to generalize our findings and incorporate what we learned into computer systems that we will interact with in our everyday life of near future. |
05/23/03