Actors can be people, other systems, time triggers, or event triggers.
An actor specifies a role played by a user or any other system that interacts with the subject. It may represent roles played by human users, external hardware, or other subjects. Actors are always outside the system and interact directly with it by initiating a use case, provide input to it, and/or receive outputs from it. While a single physical instance may play the role of several different actors, an actor does not necessarily represent specific physical entities, i.e. a timer that triggers sending of an e-mail reminder.