Presence You Can Ignore: Engineering Non-Intrusion in a Shipping Desktop Companion

A companion that shares your desk has to be able to speak first. The usual guard against that becoming an interruption is politeness, which is not a property software can hold, so this one is built out of numbers: where the character may be, how fast it may move, what its remarks may demand, what its questions may remember. An unprompted line expires on its own, offers nothing to dismiss, and is counted by nobody, so ignoring it is free rather than merely allowed. The paper is just as exact about the three places the design doesn't hold.