Hi, I’m Vic, a new comer here. I hope to learn from the community and share my ideas where they might add value to the community.

This week we just published our chatbot Aco, which is named after our company name Acosys. While most developers want to claim their bots are the smartest, I just want to say ours is SIMPLE - The clients can sign up and get a robot chatting with their website visitors in 5 minutes or less. You may try it at http://acobot.com. I mean, you can get your own Aco bot and let her chat with your website visitors.

BTW, we offer unlimited day free trial. So you don’t need to worry about fees & charges.

We certainly have taken great effort to make the bot smart. We made remarkable progress in this direction but frankly to say, based on the weak AI technologies, Aco is just as smart (or stupid :) as all the other chatbots. Our vision, or the value of Aco, is we are making AI technologies work for EVERYONE, instead of just large enterprises.

We’re striving for a chatbot that is
* smart enough to provide basic customer services to Website visitors.
* as simple as our daily web applications such as email.
* affordable to firms of any size.

I hope Aco and the team will play a small but valuable part in AI industry. I’m aware of the challenges ahead. However I’m motivated when I come here and see thousands community members. Now I know we’re not alone.

Finally, I’d like to end this post with the quote we Acosys team love most.

We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thank you for reading!

Let me be the first to welcome you and your company. Some may consider your post spam, but on the other hand if your willing to share with others here actively, perhaps that impression may change.

I will check out your bot.

Happy Holidays!

Hmm, will my post look not so spam like if it doesn’t include any link? Well, Laura thank you for the comments. I will try to be active in sharing. Happy Holidays!

Your Welcome Vic and a little FYI on your ACO Bot:
I submitted some basic statements to test your bot’s NLP capabilities, and it had real difficulty with some very basic statements. It would appear that you are running a very limited script which would not be very impressive to the average user. I just tested your website bot and I did not install a test version. From what I have read in your limited documentation is that you are using a JavaScript callback and submitting variables with information gathered by the bot during the session? If so, then these values are then updated manually to the account holder’s database and then used to expand on the bot’s future conversational capabilities or is it just sent to the bot owner like a form submission script using PHP?

Laura, you’re right, the scripts for Aco are very limited as she just got activated last month. I looked at the log for your conversation. Agree that’s disappointed. At the same time we have got some successful cases. Some people chatted and then came back to say “I find your secret… you’re not a real person!”. Some people gave their Twitter accounts and followed @bot_aco. We’re still working with those features.

We’re also testing it in a commercial environment at http://translia.com (at the risk of driving real clients away The results are not perfect but promising.

As for JS callback, yes it enable (advanced) clients to send info about end users to bot. The bot parses the values by itself. No manual process is required as long as clients give meaningful label to variables. This is where Aco is good at ^_^ We will list what Aco can do exactly on our website, probably next year…

I checked your bot site but didn’t see details. What’re the major features of your bot? Fine if you cannot disclose it this time. I will keep an eye on your site.

Vic, I like the approach that your taking in that your market is niche for small websites verses an expensive and complicated enterprise alternative .  The Twitter angle is clever and a useful tool for social marketing. As far as My Marie is concerned, this website will feature a co-browsing Ajax type environment where the user can interact naturally with the bot (Marie) using text initially and in version 2 voice recognition. The AI engine is task oriented to assist with search queries and shopping comparisons using several built-in APIs. Eventually the user will be able to set up a member account that will allow Marie to tailor her conversational style, avatar and tasks based on the user’s preferences and search history. The user interface will accommodate both cross platform mobile and desktop renderings.

It is a technically ambitious project with a very commercial appeal. Looking at a limited public beta version available sometime in February 2012.

@Vic: Welcome to the forums on my behalf!!!

Your website looks very professional! Haven’t checked out the timplementations in details, thanks Laura for your first review. Vic, look forward to the first implementations.

Looking at your profile, you’re based in Hong Kong. Are you planning to issue chatbots in Mandarin as well (or the other local languages around)?

Erwin

Happy New Year!

Although Acosys is headquartered in Hong Kong, it’s target markets are English countries such as USA, Canada and UK. We don’t have a plan for other languages yet. Theoretically the techniques we use can apply to any languages by for resource limitation we have to be focused on English at this time. After all, English is the most popular language on the Internet.

Laura Patterson - Dec 23, 2011:

... It is a technically ambitious project with a very commercial appeal. Looking at a limited public beta version available sometime in February 2012.

I’m happy to see the positive words like “technically ambitious” and “commercially appeal” at the beginning of this 2012. Will look forward to see your beta!

Hi, Vic.
I’ve tried your AcoBot for few days on my web-site (on-line store).
Here are my impressions:
1. The chat window is highly inviting since it doesn’t require a name or e-mail. Person can write something straight away, without opening a new window or dhtml layer. This is great since I was getting chat sessions every day that is in high contrast to 1-2 chats per month using usual live help engines.
2. Browsing chat logs was very useful - I even started manufacturing of new product after I saw that people need it and can’t find it elsewhere. So, your bot is the great ideas generator for a business
3. But I’ve uninstalled it finally. Its responses are quite stupid, unfortunately, so I feel myself unfair to my visitors feeding them with non-informative auto-responses when they expect to get a specific answer.

So, I would like to get a live help software that is as simple and convenient as Aco, but allows me (not a bot) to chat with visitors. If you can point me to right direction, I’ll appreciate this, though this is beyong of your interests, of course I’ve tried dozen of live help scripts, but none of them inspired me yet…

Thanks.

Rafael,

I know what you were seeking in a chatbot but unfortunately this only exists in an expensive enterprise type of solution. I am working on and will be releasing a bot that is designed for not only intelligent converstations with your visitors but is capable of suggesting and displaying products from your website all without the visitor ever leaving the page.

My Marie is a prototype of a commercial AI agent that is designed for small businesses and individuals without the high cost or need for a enterprise type server.

The prototype version (beta) will be available March 1st at MyMarie.com

Thanks for reply, Laura.
But I’m not sure that bots will be actually able to replace human operators. I was a programmer in the past, and one of our projects was a relatively simple self-learning AI. About 20 years passed since then, and I still remember that such AI’s can’t run well without training. Too many errors before they start to react more-or-less meaningfully.
But if it would be posible to create a smart enough AI that doesn’t make me ashame due its responses to my customers, I’ll be happy to see and try it - as I wrote above, live input from visitors is highly valuable Will check your MyMarie in 2 weeks for sure

I understand, that is why I have taken a whole new approach when I designed Marie. She does not have to be trained. You simply set the parameters that she needs in the way of keyword associations and the AI responses are built around them. Never a unrelated response will occur.

Hi Rafael,

Thank you so much for trying Acobot and giving feedback. To answer your question, there are software enabling you to chat with website visitors. Just google “live chat software” and you would get a lot.

Rafael, I agree the point that the bots cannot replace human operators, at this time to the least. You should choose human based solution if you expect very high accuracy and you have adequate resources. At the same time we believe AI applications can still play a small but valuable part in your business. This is why and how:

The reason the bot gave so many stupid replies to your website visitors is she knows NOTHING about your website and business. You haven’t trained her, right? As training is mentioned, you’re right, traditional AI training technique need a much time & effort (& errors) before the system can give a more or less helpful response. The good news is we, and many other developers like Laura, are working hard to solve this. In the coming weeks we’ll release some new features you might be interested in:

* Clients can enter the basic data about their website and business by filling out a few forms. Based on these data the bot can interact with website visitors in a much more smart manner, which otherwise might requires thousands lines of codes.

* Clients can customer the bot brain or design their own dialogues in an intuitive manner, without possessing any AI or programming knowledge.

Our goal is not to bring a bot that is intelligent enough to replace human operators. The success criteria for Acobot are:

1. Website owners achieve website conversion rate optimization, i.e. getting more buying clients from the same number of visitors.
2. Website owners achieve a positive ROI, including the money and time invested for bot, and thus improved profits.

Rafael, thank you again for giving valuable feedback. I will keep you posted when we release Acobot beta 2. And your comments and suggestions will be appreciated always.

Sorry, I forgot to include this in the above reply: if you need a real person live chat software as simple/easy as Acobot, I personally recommend Olark (http://www.olark.com).

Thanks, Vik. Great chat - exactly what I need Will try it for free.