Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents

Example Interaction
Mica Design

MICA is a toolkit for use in the development of applications that involve different modes of interaction and diverse autonomous agents. MICA stands for Multimodal Interagent Communication Architecture [1].

MICA is built around a blackboard paradigm. Agents connect to the blackboard and register to be notified when certain type of information are posted. Agents can then post their own messages to the blacboard and any agents registered for the message will be notified. When an agent is notified of a message it can process the information as it sees fit and if needed post its own message in response.

This manual details how to construct Mica agents for use in a variety of applications.

Example Interaction

Example Weather Interaction

Figure 1.1. Example Weather Interaction


Shown in Figure 1.1 is how a simple spoken interaction with a system could take place over Mica. This interaction involves four independant agents communicating using four messages posted to the blackboard. The sequence of the interaction is:

  1. Upon recognition of a segment of speech a speech recognition agent posts the recognized speech.

  2. When notified of the new speech text the natural language agent decodes the text into a command to get today's weather information.

  3. In response to the command for weather information a weather agent posts today's temperature and condition.

  4. The natural language agent recieves the weather information for today and transforms it into a standard English sentence which it posts in response.

  5. When notified of text to be returned to the user a speech synthesis agent synthesizes the text to audio data and plays it to the user.

One of Mica's significant benefits its ability to separate the functional components of an application from the interface components. In the example in Figure 1.1 the weather agent responds to a command to get today's weather generated by the natural language agent. This command could just as easily come from a graphical interface and the weather agent would respond precisely the same.



[1] Actually, this is the latest version of the acronym. Previously it used to stand for "Multimodal Internet Conversation Architecture", but then it was realised (a) it wasn't restricted to the internet (b) it wasn't restricted to conversation either. But the name has stuck, in any case.