Toward Intelligent persuasive Interfaces

Future intelligent interfaces will have contextual goals to pursue. As opposed to more traditional scenarios of Human Computer Interactin, the user interface mey then also aim at inducing the user - or in general the audience - to perform some actions in the real world. Some forseeable scenarios of this kind are: dynamic advertisement, preventive medicine, social action. Tis prospect has led us to investigate persuasion mechanisms and how they are connected to other related concepts such as argumentation. In modelling persuasion we take a cognitive approcach, considering the state of the participants on the basis of their beliefs-desires-intentions, but also their social ralation, their emtions and context. As far strategies are concerned, argumentation is somehow a subpart of persuasion (being a "resource" usable to "convince someone to d something "). There is more than argumentation in persuasion: we can deal with emotions to induce the receiver to act in a geven way, and/or use ours social power on him (threatening or promising). High level planning, in our mechaninsm, is then combined with the adoption of appropriate rethorical strategies (and other elemets such as lexical choice) for producing an effective and context-adapted message. The approach is promising in view of multimodal developments