Hi All, am brand new here and am really enjoying the community that has come together here so far. I am another newbie starting from almost ground zero, but as they say every journey starts with a first step.

My first question is this:

I have seen a lot of solutions built for brand engagement purposes, a few trying to bring chatbots to the masses with a personal AI, and I like what ALICE does with AIML and dialogue conversion. So, where are the folks who are really pushing the boundaries hiding? I already have several thoughts on how to take current technologies to the next level from an end user perspective, and am just kind of surprised nobody else has launched the same ideas already.

I have found that teaming a developer and a business partner is a good way to make these things happen. Any developers or companies out there looking for a new way forward?

I look forward to hearing any and all thoughts and also meeting some interesting new people here. Thanks again for the chance to be a part of something so exciting!

Darian Wilson - Apr 20, 2011:

Hi All, am brand new here and am really enjoying the community that has come together here so far. I am another newbie starting from almost ground zero, but as they say every journey starts with a first step.

My first question is this:

I have seen a lot of solutions built for brand engagement purposes, a few trying to bring chatbots to the masses with a personal AI, and I like what ALICE does with AIML and dialogue conversion. So, where are the folks who are really pushing the boundaries hiding? I already have several thoughts on how to take current technologies to the next level from an end user perspective, and am just kind of surprised nobody else has launched the same ideas already.

I have found that teaming a developer and a business partner is a good way to make these things happen. Any developers or companies out there looking for a new way forward?

I look forward to hearing any and all thoughts and also meeting some interesting new people here. Thanks again for the chance to be a part of something so exciting!

I couldn’t agree more!  Here is my very favorite example of brand engagement.  When I was a judge in the Loebner Prize Contest in 2008, my scores predicted perfectly the first, second and third place winners.  Elbot the first place winner that year, really pushed the boundaries to bring us the wonderful ⇒ IKEA Anna.

My first forum reply and I am already learning. Perfect! I am happy you came out of hiding as you definitely appear to be one of those pushing the envelope! I really like what you did at http://apps.facebook.com/eight-pla-dot-net/ and will check out more ideas from your profile and website. I also used pandorabots and fbml tp put a chatbot on my facebook page for a while… I am now thinking that the real future of all this is in the social realm, which I still have not really seen anyone doing yet. In my mind that equals low hanging fruit… I suppose we just need to juxtapose.

Hello, Darian, and welcome to chatbots.org!

We’re always open to new insights and ideas, and are also more than happy to “give as we receive”, so feel free to either give us your thoughts regarding anything AI related, or ask us ours, if you like. Many of us here are working on various projects here, either on our own, or as part of a team, and with very few exceptions, are willing to share our thoughts and our experience with the community. So pull up a seat, and join right in. I think you’ll like it here; at least, I certainly HOPE you will.

@Darian:

Welcome to forums on my behalf as well!

Did you check out the rest of the website as well? There is a lot of information on business already. Here are some tips:
http://www.chatbots.org/companies: a list of companies who are building chatbot professionally. Quite a few of them are pushing boundaries, but always within a limited field. They use a wide variety of technology.

Actually 95% of these professional developers enter their implementations in the directory tab. You can easily browse the list of active developers (in the directory, or the companies area) to checkout the chatbots they have created for clients.

We’ll expand the companies section in a ‘vendor selection tool’, in version 2.8, right after the 2.7 version (research), we’ll release today.

Yeah, we do get pretty heady, as in esoteric, in the AI Thoughts forum.  Some envelope mangling/bending going on.