There has been a steady rise in the prevalence and development of intelligent conversational agents for a growing range of different applications. However, to date, research on building intelligent agents for aiding with productivity and focus in the workplace is quite limited, despite the ubiquity of information workers across the globe. In our work, we present FocusAgent, a conversational agent which helps users schedule and block out time on their calendar to focus on important tasks, monitor and intervene with distractions, and reflect on their daily mood and goals in a single standalone application. We created two different prototype versions of FocusAgent: a text-based (TB) agent with a similar UI to a standard chatbot, and a more emotionally expressive virtual agent (VA) that employs a video avatar and the ability to detect and respond appropriately to users\u2019 emotions throughout the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
FocusAgent is a conversational agent which helps users schedule and block out time on their calendar to focus on important tasks, monitor and intervene with distractions, and reflect on their daily mood and goals in a single standalone application. We created two different prototype versions of FocusAgent: a text-based (TB) agent with a similar UI to a standard chatbot, and a more emotionally expressive virtual agent (VA) that employs a video avatar and the ability to detect and respond appropriately to users\u2019 emotions throughout the day<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"research-area":[13554],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-612117","msr-project","type-msr-project","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-human-computer-interaction","msr-locale-en_us","msr-archive-status-active"],"msr_project_start":"","related-publications":[641829],"related-downloads":[],"related-videos":[],"related-groups":[],"related-events":[],"related-opportunities":[],"related-posts":[],"related-articles":[],"tab-content":[],"slides":[],"related-researchers":[{"type":"user_nicename","display_name":"Mary Czerwinski","user_id":32824,"people_section":"Section name 0","alias":"marycz"},{"type":"user_nicename","display_name":"Javier Hernandez","user_id":38413,"people_section":"Section name 0","alias":"javierh"},{"type":"user_nicename","display_name":"Kael Rowan","user_id":32466,"people_section":"Section name 0","alias":"kaelr"},{"type":"user_nicename","display_name":"Jina Suh","user_id":32311,"people_section":"Section name 0","alias":"jinsuh"}],"msr_research_lab":[199565],"msr_impact_theme":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/612117"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-project"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/612117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":612120,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/612117\/revisions\/612120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=612117"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=612117"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=612117"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=612117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}