An intelligent user interface (Intelligent UI, IUI, or sometimes Interface Agent) is a
user interface
In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...
(UI) that involves some aspect of
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
(AI or computational intelligence). There are many modern examples of IUIs, the most famous (or infamous) being the Microsoft
Office Assistant
The Office Assistant is a discontinued intelligent user interface for Microsoft Office that assisted users by way of an interactive animated character which user interface, interfaced with the Office help content. It was included in Microsoft Off ...
, whose most recognizable agentive representation was called "
Clippy
The Office Assistant is a discontinued intelligent user interface for Microsoft Office that assisted users by way of an interactive animated character which interfaced with the Office help content. It was included in Microsoft Office for Window ...
".
Generally, an IUI involves the computer-side having sophisticated knowledge of the domain and/or a model of the user. These allow the interface to better understand the user's needs and personalize or guide the interaction.
History
Probably the earliest examples of what could be considered true IUIs appeared in the
Intelligent Computer Assisted Instruction (ICAI, aka.
intelligent tutoring system
An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is a computer system that aims to provide immediate and customized instruction or feedback to learners, usually without requiring intervention from a human teacher. ITSs have the common goal of enabling learni ...
s) community, which arose in the 1960s and 1970s
and become popular (among academics) in the 1980s. Also, in the early 1980s, as
expert system
In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert.
Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if†...
s took hold in the AI community, expert systems were applied to UIs (e.g., the aptly-named "WIZARD" system
). More recent IUIs, such as
Clippy
The Office Assistant is a discontinued intelligent user interface for Microsoft Office that assisted users by way of an interactive animated character which interfaced with the Office help content. It was included in Microsoft Office for Window ...
, were more statistically-based, using
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
methods to decide how to tune the interactive experience to the individual user.
Definitional difficulty
What constitutes "intelligent" is potentially disputable, as is what counts as an "interface", but an easy way to make this distinction is by reference to papers published in conferences dedicated to the topic, such as th
International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces or papers related to UIs published in AI conferences, such a
AAAI
See also
*
Natural language user interface Natural-language user interface (LUI or NLUI) is a type of computer human interface where linguistic phenomena such as verbs, phrases and clauses act as UI controls for creating, selecting and modifying data in software applications.
In interface d ...
**
Chatterbot
A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would beha ...
References
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User interfaces