Barbara Hayes-Roth   

Barbara Hayes-Roth is an internationally recognized expert in intelligent  agents and interactive characters. In September, 1995, she founded Extempo Systems, Inc. to commercialize interactive characters for e commerce, education and entertainment. Previously, she directed the Adaptive Intelligent Agents Project and Virtual Theater Project at Stanford University.

Title of talk: Staffing the Web with Interactive Characters . Despite its great potential as a widely accessible environment for commerce, entertainment, and learning, today's Web suffers a critical limitation. It is a cold and lonely place. Whether we are seeking goods, services, or information, we navigate Web sites alone, pushing and pulling information, searching for what we need, trying to perform transactions. This mechanical interaction with unknowing, unfeeling machines frustrates people and limits potential applications.  By contrast, in real-world enterprises, people provide the "interface,"complementing their functional roles as sales people, service reps, hosts, guides, etc., with pleasing human and social qualities. To make successful mainstream Web enterprises, we need to replace today's "user interface" with a "customer interface(tm)" that facilitates and enriches our experiences on the Web with these same functional, human, and social qualities. To achieve this goal, I propose that we should staff Web enterprises with interactive characters. Like human staff in the world, interactive characters will be ubiquitous on the Web.