Chatbots.org Business News

On 4th April 2012, Creative Virtual hosted an enlightening webinar with Forrester Research, How Virtual Agent Innovations Can Benefit Your Mobile, Web, Call Centre and Social Channels.  The event was a huge success with a turnout of over 100 attendees from around the world.  The event was hosted by Forrester Research analyst Diane Clarkson and Richard Simons, CEO of Creative Virtual USA.

A recent blog post by a tech writer compared the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology that is behind Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) like Ann at Aetna or Jenn at Alaska to the hologram technology used to resurrect Tupac for Coachella. The comparison sheds light on the reality that people – tech writers included – still do not understand that conversational NLP technologies in the form of IVAs are more than a voice, face and search. Could anyone at Coachella have a conversation with Holo-pac?  No. Or would the same comparison be made of Siri? Siri doesn’t have a face, so probably not.

Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy from University of Louisville says that we should be aware of dangerously self-aware chatbots and he suggests to keep dangerous AI entities in virtual prison for avoiding social-engineering attacks. According to him, we should improve cybersecurity, because one day disobeying virtual agents could threaten humanity’s existence.

Dr. Roman V. Yampolski from University of Louisville claims that artificial conversational entities, shopping bots, and intelligent software applications became closer in their abilities and intelligence to human beings. Therefore arised the need to recognize and verify the identity of such entities just like it is necessary to authenticate the identity of people.

New, future oriented field of artimetrics, i.e. artificial biometrics, focuses on recognition, verification, and authentication of virtual agents, robots and other nonbiological entities. As a sub-field of cybersecurity, artimetrics is being developed in Cyber-Security Lab, which prides itself on being the world’s first to conduct this kind of research.

This video shows two animated speaking chatbots talking to other. I don’t know the creator nor something about the technology used for AI components, speech technology or avatar animation. I assume that the dialogue is a text to text interaction and that the speech is synthesized (i.e. the speech itself of the other chatterbot is not interpreted).

ASR (Automated Speech Recognition) is definitely the next step. I’m waiting for it!

According to Gartner, in a few years 85% of customer-company relationships will be made without human mediation. To reach that goal we need Virtual Avatars to be more intelligent than they are nowadays.

FIONA (Framework for Interactive-services Over Natural-conversational Agents)  is a global online platform for the creation of Intelligent and Interactive Virtual Avatars.

FIONA’s first beta version is going to be launched soon and we are searching for beta testers. If you work on human computer interaction and artificial intelligence, you are 3D Designer, you have TTS or ASR modules, or you create virtual agents, you can become a beta tester. You only have to register in http://www.sparkingtogether.com.

Traditionally, virtual assistants have typically resided on a company website to help customers find the answers to their queries, but with corporate intranets becoming increasingly complex, more organizations are turning their attention to use VAs to resolve internal queries too. The corporate intranet has changed considerably from the early days of just publishing information. In the last few years as collaboration technologies have taken hold intranets have become a mine of information not just for employee related issues such as human resources, but with knowledge bases such as wikis too. However, having a large resource of data, doesn’t guarantee that a user can find the answer they are looking for.

Highly expressive avatars presented on the video are used by Vcom3D in teaching Arabic as well as culturally appropriate gestures and behaviors useful when interacting with people from Arabic countries. Developed in cooperation with Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory for military and civilian personnel working in Iraq and Afghanistan, 3D Serious Game constitutes dynamic learning environment with embodied conversational agents that feature voice, text and gestural information.

CodeBaby, a leading provider of Online Customer Experience solutions has announced its 3D virtual assistant technology is now available for the rapidly growing mobile device arena.  CodeBaby solutions drive increased website conversions while enhancing the online user experience in the consumer driven marketplace.

Facial detection software is on the verge of being implemented for business use: it can already detect average age, male or female, and even attention level. This software can be very valuable to marketeers and businesses in general. On the other hand, it is quite intrusive software and people might be worried about their privacy as it’s hard to keep your anonymity.

One of existing face recognition software is NotiFace II, a face recognition surveillance system developed by Face-Tek Technology. It integrates face recognition with security monitoring products, as presented on the video.