conversational avatar:  another page as a result of our synonym project

The term Conversational Avatar is typically used by artificial intelligence researchers as a subclass of Embodied Conversational Agents. The term is also used by chatbot developers, as a synonym of chatbot. The term is used quite rarely though.

The interesting thing is that I do believe conversational avatar is a high descriptive term, it’s actually exactly what we want to express. So when it would be up to me, we would use this term more often.

previous chatbot synonym pages:
3d human
embodied agent
virtual people
embodied conversational agent
chatterbox

Incredible.  Erwin, how many synonyms is that now??!! I still think Artificial Conversational Agent (ACE) is the most fitting.

We have identified almost 100 synonyms, and we’re now creating pages for 16 of them. Then, we’ll publish the complete list.

Didn’t you meant Artificial Conversational Entity btw? See, how confusing it it? Not only for the outside world, even for insiders!

You don’t want to know how often I have to think when I send an e-mail to professional developers, what terminology they use, because some developers don’t even want to associate themselves with other synonyms. Tough times, we’re trying to help.

Victor Shulist - Jan 10, 2011:

Incredible.  Erwin, how many synonyms is that now??!! I still think Artificial Conversational Agent (ACE) is the most fitting.

Yes, that was an error, switch “Agent” with “Entity”.

Perhaps we need a poll, which term to use, or do you have one setup already?  I’m interested to know why some developers don’t want to be associated to some synonyms, why is that?  What meanings do they assign to each term and how much do they differ?

some believe a virtual agent always has an avatar

other believe a virtual agent is the avatar (so it’s not about the AI behind it)

others believe conversational agents is jargon used only in the academic world, while they would like to position themselves as hands-on pragmatic developers.

and some people think that chatterbot is only used by enthusiastic individuals from the States

A poll is a nice idea, and it will give us a first impression, especially of which terms are NOT popular. Chatbots.org targets academics, business and chatbot enthusiastics, total different target groups, with even sub-target groups, different styles etc. A poll is to wide but outdated and rarely used, or less favorite terms would receive any votes.

More fundamental research and an extensive report is our todo list. But first, our research section! (project of more than 14 months now….).

More related news: did you know that Gartner is writing a report on virtual assistant. Guess what? We’re talking about the same, again….

Very good, thanks for that Erwin.    I very much look forward to a detailed report on this.  I also, like probably every member of this site, look forward to a standard and common terminology.  I searched via Google to find this report by Gartner, I came to http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=201581&ref=g_rss , is that the correct page?

nop, you need this follow this guy:
http://www.gartner.com/AnalystBiography?authorId=26158

his report is expected next week.