The benefits of the Remembrance Agent (RA) are many. First, the RA provides timely information. If the user is writing a paper, the RA might suggest relevant references. If the user is reading email and scheduling an appointment, the RA may happen to suggest relevant constraints. If the user is holding a conversation with a colleague at a conference, the RA might bring up relevant associations based on the notes the user is taking. Since the RA ``thinks'' differently than its user, it often suggests combinations that the user might never assemble himself. Thus, the RA can act as a constant ``brain-storming'' system.
The Remembrance Agent can also help with personal organization. As new information arrives, the RA, by its nature, suggests files with similar information. Thus, the user gets suggestions on where to store the new information, avoiding the common phenomenon of multiple files with similar content (e.g. archives-linux and linux-archives). The first trial of the prototype RA revealed many such inconsistencies within the sample database and suggested a new research project by its groupings.
As a user collects a large database of private knowledge, his RA becomes an expert on that knowledge through constant re-training. A goal of the RA is to allow co-workers to access the ``public'' portions of this database conveniently without interrupting the user. Thus, if a colleague wants to know about augmented reality, he simply sends a message to the user's Remembrance Agent (e.g. thad-ra@media.mit.edu). The RA can then return its best guess at an appropriate file. Thus, the user is not interrupted by the query, and he never has to format his knowledge explicitly, as with HTML. Knowledge transfer may occur in a similar fashion. When an engineer trains his successor, he can also transfer his RA's database of knowledge on the subject so that his replacement may continually receive the benefit of his experience even after he has left. Finally, if a large collective of people use Remembrance Agents, queries can be sent to communities, not just individuals. This allows questions of the form ``How do I reboot a Sun workstation?'' to be sent to 1000 co-workers whose systems, in their spare cycles, may send a response. The questioner's RA, who knows how the user ``thinks,'' can then organize the responses into a top 10 list for convenience.