Mixed-initiative assistants are agents that interact seamlessly with humans to extend their problem-solving capabilities or provide new capabilities. Developing such agents requires the synergistic integration of many areas of AI, including knowledge representation, problem solving and planning, knowledge acquisition and learning, multiagent systems, discourse theory, and human-computer interaction. This paper introduces seven aspects of mixed-initiative reasoning (task, control, awareness, communication, personalization, architecture, and evaluation) and discusses them in the context of several state-of-the-art mixed-initiative assistants. The goal is to provide a framework for understanding and comparing existing mixed-initiative assistants and for developing general design principles and methods. Mixed initiative assumes an efficient, natural interleaving of contributions by users and automated agents that is determined by their relative knowledge and skills and the problem-solving ...

DiamondHelp is a generic collaborative task guidance system motivated by the current usability crisis in high-tech home products. It combines an application-independent conversational interface (adapted from online chat programs) with an application-specific direct-manipulation interface. DiamondHelp is implemented in Java and uses Collagen for representing and using task models. This article addresses both of these causes by introducing a new framework for building collaborative task guidance systems, called DiamondHelp. The dominant current paradigm for humancomputer interaction is direct manipulation (Shneiderman and Plaisant 2005), which can be applied with great effectiveness and elegance to those aspects of an interface that afford natural and intuitive analogies to physical actions, such as pointing, dragging, sliding, and so on.

DiamondHelp is a generic collaborative task guidance system motivated by the current usability crisis in high-tech home products. It combines an application-independent conversational interface (adapted from online chat programs) with an application-specific direct-manipulation interface. DiamondHelp is implemented in Java and uses Collagen for representing and using task models.

Mixed-initiative assistants are agents that interact seamlessly with humans to extend their problem-solving capabilities or provide new capabilities. Developing such agents requires the synergistic integration of many areas of AI, including knowledge representation, problem solving and planning, knowledge acquisition and learning, multiagent systems, discourse theory, and human-computer interaction. This paper introduces seven aspects of mixed-initiative reasoning (task, control, awareness, communication, personalization, architecture, and evaluation) and discusses them in the context of several state-of-the-art mixed-initiative assistants. The goal is to provide a framework for understanding and comparing existing mixed-initiative assistants and for developing general design principles and methods.