A BDI agent architecture for dialogue modelling and coordination in a smart personal assistant

We discuss the architectural aspects of a smart personal assistant (SPA) system that enables users to access a range of applications from a range of devices using multi-modal natural language dialogue. Each back-end application is a personal assistant specializing in one specific task such as e-mail or calendar management, and typically each has its own user model, enabling it to adapt to the user´s changing preferences. The PDA interface to the SPA must present the system as a single unified set of back-end applications, enabling the user to conduct a dialogue in which it is easy to switch between these applications. Furthermore, the system´s interaction with the user must be tailored to their current device. The SPA is implemented using an agent platform and includes a special BDI coordinator agent with plans both for coordinating the actions of the individual assistants and for encoding the system´s dialogue model. The plan-based dialogue model is at a high level of abstraction, enabling the domain-independent plans in the dialogue model to be reused in different SPA systems.