Introduction

 

An interesting area of technology has developed in recent years, regarding the "humanization" of computer-human interaction through the use of characters, or animated "agents", that mediate between the human being and the machine.

The concept of "agent" comes originally from computer science, and it refers to small programs (software agents) that have a high degree of independency, and are used to perform a number of tasks with little or no human intervention.

Those software agents would interact with other programs (or other software agents) to monitor and control different variables in the environment. For instance, they can monitor when a database is reaching its capacity, and redistribute content to a secondary database, or they can adjust variables according to a prespecified schedule, etc. These software agents normally run in the background, and they are invisible to the human user.

The idea of the animated agent, while rooted in the same concept, makes the job of the agent a different one. An animated agent is completely visible to the human user, since its main job is to serve as a visual interface between the human being and the "cold technology".

The use of animated agents in computer application tries to make communication between the user and the computer program more "human-like", by providing an animated character that seems to behave and act independently from the program.

Those agents may receive different names (conversational agent, conversational interface, interface agent, etc.), according to the capabilities they have or the functions they are able to perform. Also, they may have different roles, such as tutoring, guiding, scaffolding, etc.