In the process of developing Flex – the personal trainer agent, our team determined several guidelines for the human-agent interaction. In order to convey that Flex was an agent capable of observation, learning, dialogue, autonomous action, we brainstormed how these could happen, storyboarded the interaction to create a reasonable flow of events, scripted the dialogue between the user and agent, and then refined the story iteratively.

We thought it appropriate that the agent have a pervasive instantiation – via mobile phone, email, and desktop applications. The role of the agent was to track progress and persist in reminding the user of both their workout schedule/activities, and to integrate some socialization into the workout session by coordinating with other users' personal trainer agents. We initially planned on having the agent inform the user of a “pick-up” game of ultimate Frisbee, but ultimately this was deemed too distracting from the overall purpose and user intent of interaction with the agent. Another idea was to have the agent select music to play during each portion of the workout session, but this was more subtly enacted.

Once we felt our story was solid we performed and recorded the voice audio portion, produced the images for the movie, tried out a rough cut of the images combined with audio, and tried various effects. With feedback on the storyline and effects we fine-tuned the movie to show the ideal interaction with Flex.