AgentSalon: facilitating face-to-face knowledge exchange through conversations among personal agents

This paper presents a system called AgentSalon, which facilitates face-to-face knowledge exchange and discussion by people having shared interests, in museums, schools, offices, academic conferences, etc. This system was designed as a sub-system of our ongoing project to construct a personal agent system for tour guidance and knowledge sharing among users. AgentSalon has a big screen for two to five users. The screen shows conversations among animated agents belonging to the users. The personal agent usually runs on our mobile guidance system, called PalmGuide, and guides its user according to his/her individual interests and touring records. When users connect their PalmGuides with AgentSalon by infrared, their personal agents with their personal information migrate to AgentSalon and engage in automated conversation. Contents of the conversation include opinion exchange about tour experiences, mutual recommendations of exhibits on behalf of the users, etc. By observing a chat of the agents, users can effectively obtain appropriate topics: that is, tempts them to follow the chat. This paper shows the first prototype of AgentSalon provided to participants in an academic conference.