Hi everyone!

We finally got the green light on the Slide Agent demo so that I can share it with all of you. Our website is still under development, so please pardon our dust..

http://home.slideagent.com/demos.html

Enjoy!

Great job, Laura! I didn’t have a very long chat there, but I probably will if I have more time on Sunday. Still running behind from chatbots 3.2, and I don’t see getting caught up any time soon. Oh well. At least I’m keeping busy.

Thanks Dave!

One thing to keep in mind is that Slide Agent is a purpose driven Chatbot. It is designed to parse your question or request and determine the topic. Once the topic has been determined then it uses the context of the query to qualify a response and ultimately directs you to the best possible resource by site navigation.

For example: I own a Ford pickup and I am currently in the military.

There are two topics that can be determined, one is obviously auto insurance and the second might be a military discount. The primary topic being auto would first need to determine the location of the customer in order to initiate a quote.

Secondly a discount rate would be suggested because the customer is a member of the military. Although the customer could easily use the site menu to ultimately find the right information or page, the bot will understand the order and information required and automatically navigate the customer to the right form and page to begin the quote process.

Slide Agent is available from any page on the site and is a useful alternative to using the search function or navigating through nested menus. Since each Slide Agent application is different, the bot master will have complete control of terminology and syntax that determines the topics. These are defined easily from within the account control panel and can be added to or modified as needed. This demo for Geico has over 80 topic categories and can navigate over 400 pages. The entire footprint of the scripting that is loaded to the client is just over 140kb and this includes all the knowledge base required. There is no database interaction involved.

I would like to have someone using a Chrome browser to test Slide Agent since I have been having some isolated issues with the initial loading of the script.  It would be much appreciated.

No chrome here, sorry. Looks very cool though.
Are you doing this by yourself or is there a team behind this?

Your wish is my command, my dear.

It seems to work well for me in Chrome (with one notable exception, mentioned below). I did, however, find an issue with the JavaScript “breaking” when an input contains multiple sentences, such as “Hello, Martin. I’m Dave.” I’m seeing the issue in every browser I’ve tried so far, including IE9, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari; all of which are the most up-to-date versions. In every case, I’m getting the following error message:

str.replace is not a function in path/to/SlideAgent.php line 1

(The various browsers vary the wording, but the intent of the message is identical)

I’ve varied the syntax, wording and punctuation of the input to a certain extent, but have yet to find a common denominator. If I use those 4 words in sequence, the script breaks with the same error message. I’ve yet to try different inputs, but I’ve only spent about 15 minutes or so on this.

Dave, was did this error occur only when you were initially asked for your name?
I think I know why this is happening and will write a fix around it ASAP. Thanks!

Jan, I am the “Team” for now..

UPDATE: Issue regarding str.replace has been resolved.
Let me know if you come across anything else.

Thanks!

Will do, Laura. And yes, that’s the only time I saw the error, because I kept refreshing the page to try other inputs, to see if I could figure out a pattern for that behavior.

It’s bit late but please accept my warm congratulations, Laura.

It sounds a very interesting application. I visited http://home.slideagent.com/demos.html but didn’t find the demo. Did I miss anything?

Thanks Vic

Actually, the demo I have up right now is the Slide Agent that answers questions about the product. The website is still under development so there is not much to see in the way of content other than the home page which does give a great overview of Slide Agent and how it works. Notice the purple tab to the left that says Slide Agent. When you click on that tab Slide Agent “slides” out and you can ask her questions about the product such as how does it work? How much does it cost? When will it be available? Platform, languages supported and so on. This will give you a general idea of how the end product works. 

Use this URL: http://www.SlideAgent.com

The Slide Agent Wizard is the Windows application that you use to design, configure and deploy your agent. That application is currently still in development and is due for international release sometime next month. I have a great distributor for Slide Agent that will handle all the international transactions and distribution. I am very excited about this product as it will open the door for many people to have virtual agents for their websites that are not subscription based. The lite version is 100% free and does not expire, as the professional version supports advanced features such as animated avatars and soon to come, text to speech and voice recognition. 

Thanks for checking it out!

@laura I just went into the site, called myself Andy (for the logs) and answered and asked some simple questions, the avatar continue to tell me that he didn’t understand anything and invited me to fill a form. I tried to answer exactly to what she asked me,

Welcome to Slide Agent Andy!

I can answer all your questions about our product. How may I assist you today?

I answered:  nicely!

she told me:
I am sorry, Andy but I do not understand,“nicely?”

Please use this form to contact our team for assistance.

and from then on… she kept indefinitely into this position..

¿Am I wrong or this avatar don’t understand a single word in English?

suggestion: I think to deploy a commercial product you need to polish this quirks a little, and at least give a thorough analysis to the meaning of the words, the intention and their semantic content of what the users might put on each situation.. and lead them into a smooth intro-transition to the talking product and its limited understanding capabilities, if not done so… the product seems harsh to me (an may be anyone) remember the people think they are talking to a person.. and this person seems (as of today) somehow stupid or silly.

best!

It was not immediately clear to me that the “slide agent” was under the purple tab.  I visited all the pages a number of times looking for it.  :-|  BTW, I really don’t care for the repeat name confirmation; I got caught in a loop.

The configuration will allow the botmaster to configure ANY response with an appropriate reply. The Slide Agent I placed on the website I configured quickly (about 10 minutes) with some simple basic responses and the default to any words that are not defined I redirected to a to the contact page with a response. Slide Agent was designed to add flexibility and to handle any language or circumstance. This is not a problem with the product. You could easily add definitions for groups for words like “nicely” and associated words and define an appropriate response. Again, I did not spend a whole lot of time in configuring the Slide Agent on the site but I do plan on tweaking it some more over the next few days. I have been more focused on finishing the wizard application and the website which is still under development. Everything wil be fully polished before the site is officially launched in July.

Thanks for your valuable input!

Marcus Endicott - Jun 6, 2012:

It was not immediately clear to me that the “slide agent” was under the purple tab.  I visited all the pages a number of times looking for it.  :-|  BTW, I really don’t care for the repeat name confirmation; I got caught in a loop.

The whole idea behind Slide Agent and the tab is not to have the agent obscure of distract from the host’s website. The tab can be configured with any color and label such as “Help Agent” or even “Click Here” that is totally up to the end user.

As far as the name confirmation, that is optional but a useful feature. Slide Agent contains a list of over 2000 common names both male and female. If a visitor enters a name that is not on a the list, then Slide Agent asks for a confirmation. The only way you end up in a loop is if you keep entering the same name without responding to “Is xxxx your correct name?” you can say “yes, okay, sure, right” or a number of other confirming words and Slide Agent will accept your name. In the case you entered your name in error, you simply say “no, wrong” or any other word the botmaster has defined as a negitive response and you will then be asked for your correct name.

Understand that Slide Agent is open to whatever the botmaster wishes to define in the way of keywords associated with topics and Slide Agent can also parse the users words specifically to additional keywords within the query itself. So Slide Agent is an open and flexible framework that is only limited to the botmaster’s imagination and application.

I would caution not to judge the functionality or limitations of Slide Agent until you download the wizard application and see how it actually works. I think you will be surprised at how flexible and powerful Slide Agent truly is.

Thanks for checking it out.

Laura, I gave a try at the URL you provided. The first interesting thing I found is SlideAgent and Acobot share a feature - bringing visitors to the relevant web page during chat. Of course the biggest difference is SlideAgent is a downloadable utility while Acobot is an SaaS…

Yes, Slide Agent is similar in that it does have the ability to navigate webpages. I had thought early on to build Slide Agent as a SaaS, but wanted instead to create a product that gave the user complete control of not only the look and feel but also the functionality. The framework is flexable in that it can be configured in a unlimited number of ways and in doing so can be tailored to any type of application. There will be add modules for e-commerce and PayPal intergration that will make Slide Agent ideal for shopping sites as well.

Thanks Vic for checking SA out!