Web guide agents - Narrative Intelligence - page 241

- Presentation through personality . The most obvious flaw of an intelligent
character that relies upon pre-written text is that the text must either be de-
signed for that particular personality, rendering it dangerous for other per-
sonalities to use, or so devoid of character that the recitation seems stilted
and unbelievable. Ultimately, one would desire an annotation language
and an agent powerful enough that the concepts could be explained, rein-
terpreted, and formed into dialog by the agent. Unfortunately, this is still
a hard unsolved problem. Syntactic sugar is a simple approximation that
frequently provides good results, as users come to associate idiosyncratic
verbal behaviors with the agent's personality. Nonetheless, a more intelli-
gent mechanism for integrating content and presentation will ultimately
be required for widespread use.
- Artful timing/delivery. Asnotedinthesectiononhumantourguides,suc-
cessful storytelling involves knowing when to begin a story, how long it
should last, and whether one should elaborate with related stories. Mak-
ing good decisions about timing and delivery requires the ability to detect
user interest, and react appropriately to it. Human beings use many sub-
tle cues to indicate low or high engagement, and detection of user inter-
est is currently very primitive. This will continue to be an important area
of research, both for development of characters and for development of
satisfactory and subtle interactions with interfaces, in general. We found
the mix of user and character control of timing in Agneta and Frida (see
Chapter 15) a very interesting and valuable approach to this problem.
Conclusions
Communication requires context, structure, and content. By adding interactive
characters to the Web, we can address its structural and contextual limitations.
As an example of our ideas, we have created guides and companions that ex-
plicitly use narrative to create a social context and to convey the content of Web
sites. By telling stories, guides put what might be otherwise dry or overwhelm-
ing information into structures that give it meaning and social value. Using
reincorporation, emotion and personality, and artful timing, human guides
can present information about tour sites in appealing and engaging ways. We
anticipate that the lessons we are learning designing interface agents according
to these principles will allow us to produce sophisticated storytelling agents,
and will be useful to others designing characters to interact in social settings
and tasks.