Wildfire is an electronic assistant, a speech-recognition system that is one of an increasing number of systems designed to help victims of the Information Age deal with information overload.

From the ubiquitous telephone to the gobs of data floating around on the Internet to taxes and electronic mail–to say nothing of the much-touted 500 channels we can soon expect to spring from our television sets–information washes over us constantly. There’s far more of it than we can possibly cope with. “The problem is that so far only half the information revolution has been delivered to us: the access and the volume,” says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future, in Menlo Park, Calif. “The other half is reducing the flood to a meaningful trickle. The people who make the money are going be the ones who make the filters and the “off’ switches.”

Wildfire is just one of those filters. It takes one way in which many of us are overwhelmed, and offers some relief “You absolutely need an intermediary,” says Nick d’Arbeloff, vice president and cofounder of Wildfire Communications, in Lexington, Mass., which has been selling the system since last December. Wildfire’s creators have cleverly made Wildfire itself appealing and eager to please. If you need her while on the phone, you simply say “Wildfire,” and she replies, as if out of nowhere: “Here I am!” Her tone is at once businesslike and welcoming, almost chatty. And she is very obliging: if you tell her to send all important calls to your car phone, she will do just that. In the next 12 to 18 months, says d’Arbeloff, Wildfire will be able to handle e-mail and faxes in much the same way as it handles telephone calls

Wildfire is part of a general trend toward cyberservants, or information “agents,” that can, according to prescribed rules, help bring order to our lives. As they are envisioned by computer scientists, within the next decade agents will our alter egos, culling information for us, reading, sorting and sending e-mail on our behalf, placing calls and performing dozens of routine tasks.

The idea of an intelligent agent is not new. In 1945. scientist Vannevar Bush envisioned a machine he called the memex, which could navigate through oceans of information. It took decades for technology to catch up to his vision. “They’re not anthropomorphic talking heads, but we’re building agents today,” says Frank Casanova, “chief evangelist” in Apple’s advanced-technology group. Most of the agents at work today are capable of performing only simple tasks. E-mail filters place priorities on incoming messages based on parameters and rules that have already been set. Such filters, for instance, might be instructed to throw out all incoming mail from your annoying cousin Harry, who sends you daily updates on his genealogy quest. A more sophisticated filter will alert you to urgent incoming mail, which has been determined from the address.

BeyondMail, a product from Banyan Systems, in Westboro, Mass., does just that. Eugene Lee, a general manager at Banyan, receives up to 140 e-mail messages every day, from clients, colleagues and the Internet distribution lists he subscribes to. It would take him hours to go through them all. BeyondMail, he points out, offers more than the ability to automatically delete junk mail. The program alerts him to pieces of mail he should read at once, tells him which messages require follow-up and sorts everything according to priority. “I know this sounds ironic, but because I have the ability to manage this information better, I’m more willing to get more of it,” says Lee. “I encourage people to copy me on things, and I subscribe to more lists. I know it won’t flood me.”

General Magic, a company in Sunnyvale, Calif., is doing some of the most interesting work in developing diligent cyberhelpers who can understand our preferences and toil on our behalf while serving as buffers for information glut. In partners with such companies as AT&T, Sony and Motorola, which make so-called personal digital assistants, General Magic is working on agents that will eventually be able to do everything from comparison shopping in the electronic marketplace to arranging a night on the town from booking the theater tickets to picking a restaurant and making reservations.

Then there’s the personalized newspaper, which aims to ease the burden of poring through the hyperabundance of newspapers, magazines, newsletters and online information resources. A leader in this field is Individual, Inc., in Burlington, Mass. Relying on 500 news and information sources monitored around the clock, Individual’s computers pick the stories that are relevant for each subscriber and deliver them in a customized form as a fax, on paper, as Internet e-mail or to a site on the Internet’s World Wide Web. Text-retrieval systems have traditionally been based on searches using key words. Individual uses a more sophisticated, more reliable method developed at Cornell University, in which such elements as word frequency and placement are used to rank documents according to their degree of relevance. For individual subscribers, the service costs $15 per month.

The idea of an intelligent agent that can help us manage the information that threatens to engulf us is seductive indeed. On the other hand, American consumers, accustomed as they are to the smarts of fictional robots like R2D2, are in danger of expecting too much from these intelligent agents. Wildfire, for one, has obvious limitations.

“Wildfire.”

“Here I am!”

“Please finish writing this story for me while I go grab a bite.”

“Try again.”

“Please write this story for me.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Never mind.”

“OK!”