The goal of the Interactive Intelligent Assistants Project at the University of Rochester is to combine ideas and technologies from several research areas in order to construct intelligent computer assistants that interact naturally and effectively with their human managers. First, it is clear that this is how people interact. If we want the computer to accomodate the person rather than the person learning how to accomodate the computer, this is is where we have to start. Second however, it turns out that thinking of the interaction as a dialogue provides many benefits that are missed in simpler forms of human-computer interaction.
Dialogue provides a shared context for interpreting what the other participant is saying or doing.
This permits much more efficient communication, since the shared context can be used to fill in unmentioned details. The dialogue also provides the structure for such conversational activities as asking questions, revisiting a topic or decision, deciding whether to say or do something, and so on. This is not very restrictive, since most things that you can think of needing a computer's help with involve a problem that needs to be solved. In fact, it is, in one sense. We would define an assistant as a cooperative agent.