Chatbots.org Business News

VirtuOz expanded its enterprise relationship with eBay to provide intelligent customer support on eBay.com. The VirtuOz solution, which is already on eBay’s sites in France (named Louise), Germany, the United Kingdom and United States, will be rolled out to other eBay Web sites.

Cassandra is our “Figure of Speech”, a title that nicely represents who and what she is.  ejTalk’s mission from the very beginning has been to focus on the basic elements of conversation instead of developing products to accomplish a singular task.  Most conversational agents today serve a particular purpose.  They talk about specific topics but do not communicate in very conversational ways.

ejTalk takes the opposite approach with Cassandra by laying a foundation for the basic principles of day-to-day speech that will one day allow her to talk about anything.  Take the example of a greeting: There are many ways to introduce oneself to another person.  We may say “hello” to a person we have just met, but to a friend we will say “hey” or “hi.”  It may seem like a trivial distinction, but to the human ear, the effect is highly noticeable.

Cassandra’s entry in the SpeechTEK Europe Avatar Challenge.

This paper is about conversation, or how people talk, and the unit of analysis used to understand the organization of conversation, the turn. It is a product of empirical research and identifies the basic unit of analysis for analyzing and generating natural conversational interaction. It represents a new paradigm, an entirely new way to measure and quantify conversational patterns that are culture, language and gender independent.

It is one of a series of papers that will be published. It is the first paper leading up to the development of Natural Conversational Technology. A long list of potential applications will also be published, such as. how to teach intelligent devices to engage in conversational interaction as a human being or how to do opinion mining from dynamic text.

Download the first paper ‘The Organization of Conversation’

After almost seven months of hard work, we are proud to present version 2.6 of Chatbots.org. This version features multiple forums, a sophisticated account mechanism, and a sleek design of sub navigation, body, and footer.

I’m glad to announce the beginning of CBC 2010 contest, good luck for all botmasters and thanks for participating. This year is full of surprises for botmasters and their chatbots.

I’m glad to announce the beginning of CBC 2010 contest, good luck for all botmasters and thanks for participating.

Chatbots 3.0 is a one-day gathering of bot creators, commercial users, enthusiasts, scientists and students interested in A.I. bot technology.

We have released the final schedule for the Chatbots 3.0 conference.  We have attracted an impressive collection of speakers who will present about a wide variety of topics of interest to all of us.  The topics span business, technology and academia.  There are still a few days of free registration left.  After March 7, the registration fee will be raised to 10 USD. 

Participants are gathering from all over the world for this exciting one-day event in historic Philadelphia.  Join us for this important, informative one-day event!  Register now at http://chatbots3.eventbrite.com

Small Worlds is a fast-growing online virtual world that runs in a browser instead of requiring you to download a graphics-intensive application. Members of Smallworlds create avatars and use these to have shared experiences like chatting, watching videos, playing games, or listening to music.

Pandorabots is a chat bot hosting service. From any browser, you may create and publish your own bots for web pages, instant messenger services, virtual worlds and many other places. Pandorabots utilizes a patented memory management algorithm that scales in number of bots, amount of bot knowledge, and number of conversational interactions. The bots are based on AIML and spring entirely from the work of the A.L.I.C.E. and AIML free software community.

IVA-2010 is an interdisciplinary annual conference and the main forum for presenting research on modeling, developing and evaluating intelligent virtual agents with a focus on communicative abilities and social behavior. The conference encourages a spectrum of presentations from theoretical issues to working applications. Researchers in human-human and human-robot interaction are also welcome to share work relevant to intelligent virtual agents.

Intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) are (in the definition of the organisation) interactive characters that exhibit human-like qualities and communicate with humans or with each other using natural human modalities such as behavior, gesture and speech. IVAs are capable of real-time perception, cognition and action that allow them to participate in a dynamic social environment.

It is being held September 20-22, 2010, in Philadelphia, USA.

Last year I’ve attended the conference in Amsterdam and it was awesome! Truely awesome. You can still expect our report on Chatbots.org, which in a more academic context than we currently present ourselves. The realtime emotion aware parameterized avatar system of Steve DiPaola was a video report of things we’ve experienced in Amsterdam. Furthermore, we’ve attened the IVA GALA 2009 awards and we’ll soon make sure the participants and winners are uploaded to the 2009 page of IVA GALA. It’s all coming up!

2010 will be a great year for the virtual agent/chatbot researchers and businesses!

Do you ever ask yourself if you are going to need an umbrella today? Or: ‘Where can I get a green tea latte’? Or: ‘What’s up this weekend’? With a new free iPhone 3GS app Siri, you simply ask these questions by talking to your phone. Your question will be interpreted and displayed and suggestions will follow immediately. Very, very cool.

And when you feel like travelling this weekend, you can just continue your questions after ‘what’s up this weekend?’ by asking: ‘How about San Francisco?’, as if you would speak to a real person. Sire will recognize that you’re still interested in something to do for the weekend as it’s context sensitive.

Awesome! Also check out review below the fold showing more examples of how you can use

VirtuOz, the provider of virtual agent solutions, announced today that the company grew rapidly in 2009, posting record sales as a result of accelerated new customer adoption and expanded use of VirtuOz at existing customers in both North America and Europe.