Chatbots.org Business News

The 19th century Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that ideas inherent in human languages might influence or limit human thought, has spawned a wide range of claims, some little more than urban legend; like the claim that the Inuit have hundreds of words for snow (they don’t, Inuit has a half-dozen words for snow, that’s fewer than English, and there’s no evidence they think differently about snow than we do). In the 1960s researchers began to formulate tests of the hypothesis and learned language was more universal than relative, leading them to largely abandon the hypothesis. In recent years, though, advances in cognitive science have made it possible to spot experimental differences that might have been missed before. So is there any real evidence now that language influences thought? A new Edge article by Lera Boroditsky say yes. Boroditsky researches cognitive science and symbolic systems - thought and language. She claims to have found solid evidence in Pormpuraaw, an Aboriginal community in Australia.

Rollo Carpenter and David Burden have braved BCS’s Machine Intelligence competition in the past. Details now in for this year’s competition:

8th British Computer Society Machine Intelligence Competition

Wednesday December 16th 2009 at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, UK, during the annual SGAI conference AI-2009

Closing Date for Entries: October 1st 2009

Microsoft’s Project Natal delivers a new addon to your XBox that allows you to play without controller. The system has a 3D camera that maps the exacts position of your hands, your fingers, your feet, your header, your nose, everything in a 3D map. This allows you to control the game with only your body, in great detail, and no controller needed. Furthermore, it recognises voice and faces and supports complex video chat.

Inbenta announces the launch of “Semantic Site Search”, a new service (SaaS-based) that provides search to any website within the cloud computing. After four years of development (project codename: voldemort), this search service includes Semantic Search capabilities and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Site owners will be able to easy-integrate Semantic Search engine on their site and their content. Other features include customization, XML ,API, and real-time reporting tools.

Chatbots.org is now a PR 5 site (Google pagerank). This is the result of extra attention on websites due to the launch of version 2.0, new links to the site and in existing groups related to chatbots and natural language processing. We’ll probably end up with a pagerank of 7 somewhere next year (when we realized our objectives of 100.000 visitors a month).

O2 UK’s online chat service ‘Ask Lucy’, is currently receiving around 1,000 questions per day as it nears the end of its pilot period, Mobile Today reported. The results of the pilot so far show that customers are choosing instant messaging over a telephone conversation to resolve service issues. Orange UK, T-Mobile UK and 3 UK also offer live chat services with agents on a PC, who ‘chat’ with customers to sell, upgrade or solve problems. T-Mobile’s chat service ‘Ask Laura’, was launched in February. T-Mobile head of the service Elliott Lawrence said feedback has been positive and that T-Mobile will look to further develop the service.

TellMe for Windows Mobile 6.5 isn’t just an app, it’s a one-button hub for voice commands of all kinds, including text messaging, making calls, and also jumping to Microsoft Live Search with natural language queries like “weather in San Francisco, California,” “pizza in Kansas City” or “mother’s day gift ideas.”

The company PittPatt has face mined the TV series Star Trek. Specifically, they applied algorithms in face detection, face tracking and face recognition to 67 Star Trek episodes over three seasons. This process automatically extracts all visible face tracks, and clusters these into a small number of same-person groupings. Currently, PittPatt recognize frontal or near-frontal tracks. In the near future, we will extend our results to non-frontal tracks as well.

This patent for automatically sending an audio or video reply to an iChat call is only useful for computer to computer calling, but also for iPhone to computer calling, or computer to iPhone calling.

The server could additionally be set to store video responses, such that when a person comes back online, they could view one or more clips recorded by their peers. To facilitate this, Apple proposes creating a generic video mailbox which could be accessed from iPhones or a website.

Wave is a new communication platform by Google. It’s a Frothy Collaborative Mix of Chat, Instant Messaging, Twitter and Google Docs in Real-Time:. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more..

Gizmodo Australia:

idea is to drag email and IM into real-time-so it’s free-wheeling mesh of Twitter, IM, Friendfeed really, any other kind of service presenting semi-real-time stuff in a stream. But in Google Wave, you can share and collaborate on projects, and all of this is mashed together at once, so it might be the ultimate service for people with ADD, or enterprise looking to simulate the feeling of 10 people standing around a desk scattered with a bunch of projects, but you’re all able to work on any of them simultaneously while you’re also whispering to the cute girl across the table about the new sushi place around the corner. You start a wave with any message or photo or whatever, and you bring people into the discussion, and then they can bring other people in as well (unless you block it or start kicking people out) so it’s as public or private as you want it to be.

More screenshots and video after the break.. We can wait for the first chatbots demonstrated on this platform!