Edinburgh Napier University

  Wizard of Oz experiments allow designers and developers to
see the reactions of people as they interact with to-bedeveloped
technologies. At the Centre for Interaction Design at
Edinburgh Napier University we are developing a Wizard of Oz
system to inform and further the design and development of
Companion based technologies. Companions are intelligent,
persistent, personalised, multimodal, natural language
interfaces to the Internet and resources such as photo or music
collections. They have the potential of turning our current
human-machine interactions into human-machine relationships.
In particular, a Companion prototype for reminiscing about a
photo collection, called PhotoPal, is being used in our
experiments. Several Wizard of Oz experiments have been run
to assess people’s reactions and thoughts about using a
Companion interface. The feedback from these experiments has
informed both the design direction and choice of development
technologies going forward. The Wizard of Oz system has also
been put to use in a classroom of young pupils and to aid adults
make more productive use of the Internet for learning. Further
experiments to investigate the appropriateness of Companion
dialogue are planned.