Barbara Hayes-Roth, president of Santa Clara, California-based Extempo Systems, laughs with delight as she watches an artificially intelligent dog named Rover roll over before commanding it to do so.
The dog, a VRML 2.0-based character developed by Extempo as part of a forthcoming collaboration with Sony's Community Places, is a type of "greeter" character that Hayes-Roth believes will become an essential element of Web sites.
Speaking Thursday in Los Angeles at the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Hayes-Roth said she founded Extempo a year ago with the idea that companies and individuals would buy the building blocks of an electronic "greeter" who could welcome and entertain visitors or, at the bare minimum, lend a little attitude to a site.
"Web sites are lifeless. These agents would add a dimension that would serve both the visitor and the host," said Hayes-Roth, who also directs an intelligent-agents laboratory at Stanford University.
"We're making the mind-body API that can work with anything," she said.
Borrowing from the language of movies and theater, Extempo carries two types of characters: star imps - for improvisational characters - that have preprogrammed behaviors that are typical of a given character, and extras that stand in the background to fill in a scene.
For example, a bartender star named Erin is programmed to make drinks, sweep the floor, and engage in basic barroom prattle - including flirtation - all with appropriate body language. She is also programmed to be an aspiring rock star and can "talk" to visitors about her favorite bands and songs. But Erin can't understand subjects outside her programmed behaviors, including most nonmusic current events.
Spurred on by readily available computing power, animated chat is taking many forms, posing a challenge for fledgling companies like Extempo. For now, Extempo is developing for two platforms - a multi-user VRML 2.0 format for the Sony collaboration, and a standalone C++-based LiveComics application for Erin.
"We were being sensitive to long downloads [when programming Erin]," said Keith Wescourt, director of product management. "[Visitors] get the graphics that are operated by Erin, but she's deciding her reactions and actions back on the host company's server."
A dog and a barmaid are only the beginning. Hayes-Roth sees applications of these agents in online commerce and research to help show visitors around a site, fetch information and - in the future - glean something about a person's likes and dislikes in a manner that may - or may not - be less contentious than the present "magic cookie" approach to ad targeting and market research.
