Abstract

Computers are being used for an increasing number of applications and at the same time computer programs are becoming more complex. This justifies the need for better user interface technology. Intelligent user interfaces (IUIs) try to solve human-computer interaction problems by providing new methods of communication and by adapting to the user. Research on new communication methods focuses on natural language systems, gesture recognition, image recognition, and multimodal interfaces. Adapting to the user is done by using techniques from artificial intelligence to perform reasoning and learning, for example user modeling and plan recognition.
Intelligent interface agents, which are anthropomorphic computerized beings, combine several of these techniques. They try to help the user by automating a particular task.
Although undoubtedly, many improvements will be made to the current object-oriented direct-manipulation interfaces that we use now, it is very likely that the interface of the future will be very different. Expectations are the adaptive interfaces and multimodal interfaces will be mixed together, creating more powerful and intelligent interfaces.