Lillian was a virtual librarian. She was designed to answer user queries about books, and particularly library holdings. As well as being able to tell a user if a library holds a particular book she could also:
- Deep link them to the library's own holdings page for the book, which may have availability and reservation data
- Direct them to another library that holds the book if the local library doesn't
- Direct them to the right page on Amazon if the book is not held
- Advise them of books by a particular author held
- Advise them of books on a particular subject held
- Tell them what the book is about
- Tell them what other people thought of the book
- Tell them what books people like who also liked this book
You could ask Lillian questions like:
- Do you have a library near........ (e.g. Bury) - is a good idea to get Lillian to find you a nearby library before looking for books
- I live near ....... (e.g. I live near Bury) do you have .......... (e.g. Snowcrash)
- Do they have ...........
- Who wrote ...............
- What is * like
- What is * about
- What else is like *
- What else did * write
She is not programmed for general chat.
Lillian combines:
- The Discourse™ Natural Language Interface and
Chatbot engine from Daden Limited
- The Sitepal™ animated
avatar and text to speech system from Oddcast Inc
- Web services interfaces from:
o Talis
o Amazon
o OCLC
Lillian is a web native, web delivered application, requiring only a browser with the Flash plug-in installed to work (Flash plug-in only required for avatar and text-to-speech).
The current version of Lillian is only a proof-of-concept. As such she lacks the security, resilience and error trapping that would be found in a production system, and only implements some of the knowledge cases which would be required in a publicly accessible system.
A text only version is also available for low-bandwidth use.
Kingston University re-launched its international student portal and put smartAgent at the core. Potential new students from all over the world have been engaging with one of six characters who show them around University and answer questions about life as an international student, not only at Kingston but also the United Kingdom. The smartAgent is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, crucial when dealing with enquiries from any time zone.
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