Designing Proactive Thought Partners for Writing
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, yet existing proactive tools largely focus on generic textual assistance, such as autocomplete. This paper studies the design space of proactive thought partners: AI agents that proactively offer customizable, higher-level cognitive support during writing. We instantiated this concept in a technology probe and deployed it with 16 participants for one week. The probe allows users to create partners by configuring their roles and proactivity. As users write, relevant partners take the initiativ...
| Authors | Chao Zhang, Abe Davis, Chih-Wei Chen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.HC |
| Published | 1 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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