The New York Times has an article on Giving Expression to Communication With the Help of Virtual Humans . The deadline is 30 September 1997. Autonomous agents or multiagent systems are computational systems in which several computational agents interact or work together to perform some set of tasks. These systems may involve computational agents having common goals or distinct goals. This book deals with these issues.
Downloadable example is in the download area.
General Magic plans to sell the service to companies that want to let their mobile workers retrieve voice mail, e- mail and information off their computers by phone. The system relies on two key advances by General Magic researchers. One is in an extremely sophisticated speech recognition system, which understands complex sentences, not just words. DAI-List is a mailing list for Distributed AI run by Michael Huhns of the University of South Carolina.