Designing Proactive Thought Partners for Writing
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
Writing involves diverse cognitive activities, from ideation to revision, and writers' needs vary across individuals and moments. Proactive AI promises to provide the right support at the right time,...
CoWriter is a proactive agentic system that adapts expert human co‑authoring methodologies from cognitive science to guide the entire writing workflow and actively encourage user engagement. In an exploratory user study, authors using CoWriter expressed their perspectives more clearly, felt greater ownership of the document, and engaged with the agent 2.2× more often than a standard LLM baseline. External reader judges also rated CoWriter‑generated texts higher in human‑touch qualities such as storytelling and personal experience integration.
The paper proposes a proactive writing support system that infers users’ needs from their writing interactions, using Flower and Hayes’ cognitive process theory as a framework. By mapping six cognitive processes to 14 specific support types and associated interaction behaviors, the authors develop AToM CoWriter, which offers context-aware suggestions without requiring explicit prompts. Two within-subjects studies with 21 participants show that this approach improves expressiveness, idea exploration, and engagement with proactive suggestions.
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DocuTeam is a mixed‑initiative multi‑agent discussion system that allows both users and agents to start and steer conversations around evolving documents. Agents monitor changes to the document and proactively initiate or redirect discussions, while users can shape the dialogue or adopt agent suggestions. In a within‑subjects study with 20 participants, DocuTeam produced outcomes that were rated as more novel, relevant, and specific compared to a baseline, without increasing cognitive load.
arXiv:2609.39333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous AI agents can turn authors' goals into interactive narratives by independently organizing and carrying out generation and revision. As age...