Chatbots.org Business News

VirtuOz, the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online customer service, appointed Laurent David as Head of Sales, France to support VirtuOz’ European growth and response to increased demand for intelligent virtual agents. With 22 years of successful sales experience in promoting the adoption of disruptive technologies, Laurent David is responsible for managing VirtuOz’s continued growth in France as well as expanding VirtuOz’ European presence.

During 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation researchers from Technical University of Munich presented a dual-armed robot capable of playing pool on a normal sized pool table.

The intelligent virtual agent (IVA) value proposition is so compelling for both the online consumer and the business provider that leading analyst firm Gartner Research predicts that virtual agents will be the standard technology for customer interactions in two to four years.  The aggressive adoption of IVAs is a consumer led revolution in which an increasingly large generation of users, including but not limited to digital natives, are living in an online world where blogging, texting, tweeting, eCommerce, and social networks are the way of life.  This Web savvy consumer prefers both their personal and business engagements to be conducted online.  The IVA offers a compelling customer experience that aligns with the consumer’s expectations.

Yahoo!, Google and Bing launched revolutionary microdata format that will change the way search engines understand, analyze and categorize your site! Will that make a breakthrough in chatbot industry as well?

The video above presents Schema.org project, explaining its functionality on the basis of the word “avatar”. In fact, it is quite confusing, because the term ‘avatar’  can refer to the famous movie, a digital image representing a human, and also avatar in the form of conversational agent present on a website. Chatbots.org have already identified this term as a part of over 130 chatbots synonyms collection.

Independent analyst firm CCM Benchmark predicts that virtual agent implementations will be an industry standard in 3 to 5 years, a critical component in customer services and even the main point of contact in 2014.

The firm surveyed 57 global ecommerce leaders in Q1 2011 on their plans for deploying virtual agents as part of their customer service strategy. This group predicts a 100% increase in virtual agents in 2011, with that number skyrocketing to 400% by 2014. Virtual agents are services such as an automated, intelligent, virtual human on a website, assisting consumers during purchases or for customer service in natural language, therefore also often referred as virtual assistants.

In addition to the growth predictions, the majority of respondents cited use of the virtual agent for “right channeling” purposes as the most promising emerging application. Integration of the AI avatars with live chat (66%) and use of the virtual assistant as the point of first contact for all online customer interactions (56%) gained the most interest.
This study meets findings from VirtuOz 2011 user conference, at which 75% of respondents agreed that virtual agents will be used as the first point of contact for online sales and service by 2014.

Additional value drivers highlighted in the study include:

• 67% note eDeflection from higher cost customer service channels as a key benefit of VAs.
• 51% believe that VAs will increase their “customer requests” handling capacity.
• 36% believe virtual agents will provide insight into user trends to determine and optimize new service issues as they arise.
• 33% believe that VAs will address search limitations.

“Ecommerce vendors serve on-line savvy consumers who are demanding more sophisticated self-service tools that offer a richer and more satisfying customer experience,” said Steve Adams, CEO and president of VirtuOz, a US/European provider of virtual agents for online customer service.

Chatbots.org also noted a steep rise of interest in the application of virtual assistants in customer services. The website lists all implementations of virtual humans across the world in three main categories: customer services, e-learning and gaming. The application in the customer service area is growing fast; in 2010, 95% of registered implementations were related to customer service and e-commerce.

The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HIT Lab NZ) is developing and commercializing technology that improves human computer interaction and by doing so unlocks the power of human intelligence.

Now, they have been able to add virtual agent Greta, an agent specifically designed for research, to reality. Check it out, this is really cool of how the future will look like!

Blog Post recalling a conversation that Daden’s own chatbot Abi had.

VirtuOz, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online customer service, today announced that it has raised $7 million in additional funding from existing investors Mohr Davidow, Inventures Group and Galileo Partners to finance growth in the U.S. and E.U.

Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have recently demonstrated that a computer can decode brain signals to infer the intentions of a human thoughts. From now on, people can “talk within their minds” to a computer in order to control it. How the act of human mind reading, usually associated with science-fiction literature, is actually possible?

Google Labs has initiated a new project called Google Talk Guru, a so-called search engine chatbot. It sounds promising; however at this stage you can only enquire about 7 topics: