Agents Invade the Desktop

Software automates business tasks, from taking calls to mining data.

Rainer Mauth

A new breed of software agents is set to turn your desktop into a much smarter command center. To start, agents will answer phone calls, organize unstructured data, and search the Web. Although their approaches are different, new software products from Planning Sciences (London), Siemens Nixdorf (SNI, München), and Cambridge Neurodynamics (Cambridge, U.K.) focus on making people more productive.

Planning Sciences' Gentium 3.0 combines a multidimensional database engine with agent technology to construct large-scale data warehouses. This multiplatform product, which should be commercially available this month, includes a suite of tools for automated and scheduled extraction, cl eansing, and transformation of data executed by an armada of agents. Each Gentium agent operates in its own thread, thus allowing many agents to work simultaneously across the network or within a single node. The system features "habitual" and "triggered" agents that can be programmed and scheduled interactively in dialog boxes or graphically in diagrams. Other types are "Director Agents," which watch for changes in t he file system; "Extractor Agents," which dig for character patterns in documents; and "Process Agents," which can run on-line analytical processes (OLAP) or put together a base of information from the Extractor Agents' discoveries. Gentium's agents are able to build and update entire data warehouses and general information bases for decision support.

Siemens Nixdorf's road map for its workplace information management system includes agents that take over routine business tasks. SmartAssist, SNI's object-oriented personal task and work-flow planner for Wind ows, was released in March and will be enhanced through a "MAPI Agent," an "Info Agent," and a "Phone Agent" during 1996. The MAPI Agent will enable SmartAssist to react to events in the MAPI subsystem, to understand the properties of received messages, and to execute predefined actions such as informing the user or forwarding messages. The Info Agent will be able to retrieve, filter, and sort data from different sources; for example, MAPI message stores, Internet newsgroups, the Web, or other on-line services.

The most intriguing Phone Agent combines computer telephony and voice recognition. It will be able to respond to a call depending on Caller ID, accept voice commands for updating appointments in the personal scheduler of SmartAssist, or activate speech-to-text operations. Phone Agent will be able to arrange appointments with callers or autonomously distribute calls to your colleagues, SNI says.

AutoNomy, Cambridge Neurodynamics' suite of neural network-based agents, le ts users locate and retrieve information on the Web. The "Press Agent," for example, goes out and compiles a personal newspaper based on the user's interests. The "Mail Agent" reads, digests, and filters incoming e-mail. Agents accept queries posed in natural language. Users can interact with the search process directly or leave the agents hunting in the background.

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Let Your Agents Do the Surfing

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Cambridge Neurodynamics' AutoNomy deploys neural nets to examine the Web.