Intelligent user interface

An Intelligent User Interface (Intelligent IU, IUI, or sometimes Interface Agent) is a User Interface (UI) that involves some aspect of Artificial Intelligence (AI or Computational Intelligence). There are many modern examples of IUIs, the most famous (or infamous) being the Microsoft Office Assistant, whose most recognizable agentive representation was called "Clippy".

Definitional Difficulty

What constitutes "intelligent" is potentially disputable, but an easy easy way to make this distinction is by reference to papers published in conferences dedicated to the topic, such as the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, or papers related to UIs published in AI conferences, such as AAAI.

Early IUIs

Probably the earliest examples of what could be considered true IUIs appeared in the Intelligent Computer Assisted Instruction (ICAI, aka. intelligent tutoring systems) community, which arose in the 1960s and become popular (among academics) in the 1980s. Also, in the early 1980s, as expert systems took hold in the AI community, expert systems were applied to UIs (e.g., the aptly-named "WIZARD" system)