Agents in the Telecommunication Industry

This paper examines the area of Intelligent Agents from the perspective of the telecommunications industry. It attempts to answer or at least discuss three main questions:

• What applications of agent technology are well suited for the telecommunications industry?
• What special issues arise when applying agent technologies to the telecommunications industry?
• Why should a telecommunications company be in the business of intelligent agents?

Some of the applications of agent technology which appear most promising in this industry are:

• Information Services - These include narrow domains primarily related to commerce and entertainment such as restaurant or movie guides and broader based service such as electronic yellow pages. These may be delivered via interactive television, Internet, or the conventional telephone network using interactive voice response systems (IVR) or specialized display telephones. They may also be embedded in content delivery services (e.g. video-on-demand).
• Call Management - Agents acting on behalf of the user can monitor incoming telephone calls, automatically routing calls to the appropriate place (e.g. voice mail, cellular phone, work phone, etc.) and notifying the user of important messages.
• User Assistance - Agents may provide context sensitive help, guide users through tasks, or provide other assistance to users unaccustomed to new technology. User customization.
• Information Filtering and Retrieval - Filtering, retrieval, and translation of email, voice mail, etc.

There are several issues which present special challenges to companies developing agent technology (and other information services ) in our industry. These include:

• non-standard I/O devices - In our primary areas of business, the devices with which end users actually interact with our services are not the keyboards, mice, and high resolution display monitors used in most computer applications. These devices (CPE in telephony jargon) include:

• touch-tone telephone keypad input (telephone) - possibly voice input remote control input (cable television/interactive television)
• voice output (standard telephone)
• low resolution, physically distant video output (cable television)

• Limited local processing - There is limited or no intelligence in the remote location, requiring intelligence in the network or servers and distributed computation model.
• Low memory set-top box (cable)
• No local intelligence (standard telephone)
• Multiple users per access point - Most agent applications assume that there is a unique user with a particular set of goals, attributes, etc. and perform inferences based upon user profiles or statistical models, resulting in actions appropriate for that user. In our environment, each access point serves several people in a household. In the case of cable television, there are typically several individuals interacting with the service simultaneously.

In addition to the challenges described above, there are some characteristics of the telecommunications industry which present some unique opportunities for advancing agent technology:

• Extensive Communications Network - Since communications plays such an important role in agent technology, the existence of a network and supporting infrastructure connecting nearly 100% of the population is clearly an important asset. As people rely on agents, reliability becomes paramount.
• Ubiquitous Presence - Telephones and televisions are found in nearly 100% of households and are already integrated into people's lives.
• Critical Mass - Many statistical approaches to agent functionality such as social filtering require a critical mass of actively engaged users in order to be effective. The ubiquity and heavy use of both the telephone and cable networks offer a unique opportunity to achieve this critical mass.

Dennis Connolly
Ameritech
dennis.x.connolly@ameritech.com