A framework for attaching personal assistants to existing applications

Personal assistants are computer programs that enhance the functionality provided by a software application by implementing a mixed initiative interaction with the user in which both, the assistant and the user, can execute tasks and initiate the interaction with each other. This kind of software is also known as Interface Agents in the Artificial Intelligence community. A key problem in systems implemented so far is that the interface agent and the application are seen as a unit of software and the code of the agent is embedded in the code of the application resulting in highly coupled and hard to maintain systems. In this paper we present a solution to this problem. We propose a framework that will allow attaching an interface agent to a conventional application without modifying the application in any way. This will allow us to enhance an existent application with an interface agent to assist the user for which we do not have the source code available.