Intelligent user assistance facility for a software program

Abstract

A general event composing and monitoring system that allows high-level events to be created from combinations of low-level events. An event specification tool allows for rapid development of a general event processor that creates high-level events from combinations of user actions. The event system, in combination with a reasoning system, is able to monitor and perform inference about several classes of events for a variety of purposes. The various classes of events include the current context, the state of key data structures in a program, general sequences of user inputs, including actions with a mouse-controlled cursor while interacting with a graphical user interface, words typed in free-text queries for assistance, visual information about users, such as gaze and gesture information, and speech information. Additionally, a method is provided for building an intelligent user interface system by constructing a reasoning model to compute the probability of alternative user's intentions, goals, or informational needs through analysis of information about a user's actions, program state, and words. The intelligent user interface system monitors user interaction with a software application and applies probabilistic reasoning to sense that the user may need assistance in using a particular feature or to accomplish a specific task. The intelligent user interface also accepts a free-text query from the user asking for help and combines the inference analysis of user actions and program state with an inference analysis of the free-text query. The inference system accesses a rich, updatable user profile system to continually check for competencies and changes assistance that is given based on user competence.