Chatbots.org Business News

Virtual human Spike has its own beliefs and values. Additionally, it exhibits rude, pessimistic and confrontational behavior. Even a very cheerful person is not able to convince this virtual agent to chill out, relax or assimilate optimistic outlook. Would you like that Spike became your conversational friend?

Don’t be surprised if your child creates his/her first conversational agent earlier than you! Researchers from DevTech Research Group at Tufts University made it possible…

VirtuOz, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online customer service, today announced that Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content and threat management solutions, celebrates the first anniversary of Lena, an intelligent virtual agent powered by VirtuOz, to provide world-class online customer and technical support.

Researchers from Human Centered Multimedia at the University of Augsburg developed a virtual character which is capable of recognizing and displaying the emotion of a user.

You’re walking down the street and passing by a multiservice kiosk. Would you like a virtual guide to be at your service? This video demonstrates how it could look like - watch it and check for yourself if it’s worth using.

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.