Experiences with the Design, Fielding, and Evaluation of a Real-Time Communications Agent

We review the design and evaluation of a fielded communications agent that routes telephone calls for several hundred people at our organization. In an advanced mode of operation, the system performs a cost-benefit analysis to balance the priority of calls with the context-sensitive cost of interrupting users. We discuss the challenges with developing a communications agent spanning client-side software and telephony infrastructure. We focus on metaphors and tools that allow users to specify priorities and costs of interruption. We report on the results analysis of surveys and monitored logs of preferences and activities. Our work to develop call-handling agents for telephony includes efforts to develop event-sensing machinery that can provide an understanding of a user's situation, including events drawn from a user's calendar, system activity, and perceptual sensors such as microphones and cameras. We also have addressed challenges with extending legacy communications infrastructure, in an attempt to integrate context-sensitive call-handling with existing corporate PBX systems and voice over IP (VOIP) protocols. We focus in this paper on the critical challenge of formulating designs that allow users to express preferences about communications— preferences that are often viewed by users playing a central role in their personal and professional lives. We first provide background on the Enhanced Telephony (ET) system, a platform that integrates client-side software with an organizational PBX and discuss the overlay of a call-handling agent named Bestcom-ET on top of the ET platform. Then, we review research on interruptability that has influenced the design and operation of Bestcom-ET. We review designs for tools aimed at acquiring call-handling preferences from users in an efficient manner. Finally, we review the results from surveys and from the analysis of the preferences and logs of Bestcom-ET users that took part in a study.