Talea: connecting guidance, demonstration, and selective automation in a spreadsheet agent

Talea puts an agent panel beside a spreadsheet. The agent guides the user through a procedure, learns one from the user's description and demonstration, or carries out steps the user approves. What the user teaches is stored and reused when the agent later gives guidance or proposes a plan.

The demo is a rebuild that applies changes proposed in the paper's Discussion, listed in its About. Updated 2 October 2026.

System overview

Figure 1. Teach writes task records into the knowledge base; Learn and Collaborate read them.

Learn

Agent explains, user performs

Teach

User demonstrates, agent learns

Collaborate

Shared execution

Interface as in the study (paper figures).

Study

Eighteen participants used all three modalities in one facilitated session, each modality on a different spreadsheet task. Teaching was the most demanding: eight participants found it hard to word a step, and participants divided the same procedure into one to five steps. Reuse of a taught procedure was not observed; the manuscript reports the design and its limitations in full.