Industrial Applications of Intelligent Systems at BTexact

Abstract

Soft computing techniques are beginning to penetrate into new application areas such as intelligent interfaces, information retrieval and intelligent assistants. The common characteristic of all these applications is that they are human-centred. Soft computing techniques are a natural way of handling the inherent flexibility with which humans communicate, request information, describe events or perform actions.

Today, people use computers as useful tools to search for information and communicate electronically. There have been a number of ambitious projects in recent years including one at BTexact known as the Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA), with the aim of revolutionising the way we use computers in the near future. The aim remains to build systems that act as our assistants and go beyond being just useful tools. The IPA is an integrated system of intelligent software agents that helps the user with communication, information and time management. The IPA includes specialist assistants for e-mail prioritisation and telephone call filtering (communication management), Web search and personalisation (information management), and calendar scheduling (time management). Each such assistant is designed to have a model of the user and a learning module for acquiring user preferences. In this talk I focus on the IPA, its components and how we used computational intelligence techniques to develop the system.