Software secretaries: learning and negotiating personal assistants for the daily office work

Software Secretaries are office automation systems that provide assistance in managing work-related activities, in much the same way as human secretaries. This concept seems clearly attractive, since such software could make available to everyone within an organization the kind of secretarial assistance that is presently available only to a small fraction of workers. In order to behave similar to human secretaries, such software packages need two major features: 1) the agents must be able to negotiate, because most office tasks contain interaction among several people; and 2) the agents must be able to learn to adapt to their users idiosyncrasies and the specific workflows that can differ substantially from organization to organization. Mechanisms for negotiation and learning have been included in agents for calendar and room management (CAP, CAP II and RAP) that are described in this paper. In addition, the architectural considerations are presented on how to systematically bundle different agents to yield a software secretary package