Background to the Companions Project

COMPANIONS is a 12.88 million Euro interdisciplinary research project which focuses on combining advanced technologies to create personal, persistent 'agents' or 'Companions'. Companions are a new paradigm for the way people deal with the Internet, as computational agents that are personalized and persistent, sensitive to the needs of, and relationship with, the single owner.

The embodiment of a Companion is relatively unimportant: it could be a screen head, a mobile phone, or some simple object, easy to carry about, like a handbag, The key thing is talk: the Companion, whatever its size or shape, will be a conversational entity, interacting with its owner over long periods. It is an ECA (Embodied Conversational Agent) but with an emphasis on the conversation rather than the graphical forms. That is what the project's first trial demonstrators are aiming at, however simplified they turn out to be.

The Companion vision is that a Companion becomes, in a precise sense, part of the user's memory on the web, essentially their memory of themselves and their life events. The originality here is the use of conversation as a tool of reminiscence for user's who will already have much of their life's data in digital form, such as images, texts and videos. The Companion is there to give that data a narrative form, a life story, for the benefit of the user and their successors. In the Senior Companion the aim is also to divert, entertain, instruct and help.

A crucial component in the Companion vision is the relationship of the Companion, not only to its owner, but to the Companions of other users; as well as the relationship of users to each other mediated by their Companions. Users will be likely to have revealed details of themselves, their financial intentions, their health etc. to their Companion they would not want shared or gossiped about.

Companions will need to show trust by understanding different levels and types of information entrusted to them and what can be done with it: how far, when making a date with another user via his or her Companion, it can reveal relevant and useful things ('I think my owner likes yours!').

In other words, Companions must know how they are affecting the moods and emotions of their users and how far they are doing what they were intended to do, and not more; they must be able to assess both their owner's state and their own capacities.