Читать книгу Designing Agentive Technology - Christopher Noessel - Страница 26

“Agent” has been used traditionally in services to mean “someone who helps you.” Think of a customer service agent. The help they give you is, 99 percent of the time, synchronous. They help you in real time, in person, or on the phone, doing their best to minimize your wait. In my mind, this is much more akin to an assistant. But even that’s troubling since “assistant” has also been used to mean “that person who helps me at my job” both synchronously—as in “please take dictation”—and agentively—as in “hold all my calls until further notice.”

These blurry usages are made even blurrier because human agents and assistants can act in both agentive and assistive ways. But since I have to pick, given the base meanings of the words, I think an assistant should assist you with a task, and an agent takes agency and does things for you. So “agent” and “agentive” are the right terms for what I’m talking about.

Complicating that rightness is that a recent trend in interaction design is the use of conversational user interfaces, or chatbots. These are distinguished for having users work in a command line interface inside a chat framework, interacting with software that is pretty good at understanding and responding to natural language. Canonical examples feature users purchasing airline tickets (yes, like a travel agent) or movie tickets.

Because these mimic the conversations one might have with a customer service agent, they have been called conversational agents. I think they would be better described as conversational assistants, but nobody asked me, and now it’s too late. That ship has sailed. So, when I speak of agents, I am not talking about conversational agents. Agentive technology might engage its user through a conversational UI, but they are not the same thing.