Chatbots.org Business News

After months of hard work, we’re delighted to announce the new version of chatbots.org, creating a, in our opinion, world-class community platform for professional chatbot developers. We’re glad we’ve managed to implement so many wishes of chatbot developers world wide and we’ve added lots of functionality that we believe advances the chatbot community across the world.

Please read on about our tightened mission, the new functionality, new content, the history, the community, the future, and how your participation could help you create success, learn and get in touch with professional partners.

Chattie is a new service that acts as your replacement on MSN. As soon as you go offline, your Chattie takes over. Since Chattie is your personal chatbot, you can define what he says.

Almere is the first Dutch city to have a virtual agent installed on its homepage. Her name is Ally and she will answer any question asked on Almere.nl, giving the site a truly personal touch. The launch of Ally is a result of a successful experiment with the Almere Hyves page (alike to Facebook) and has been officially live on Almere.nl since March.

We engage in numerous discussions throughout the day, about a variety of topics, from work assignments to the Super Bowl to what we are having for dinner that evening. We effortlessly move from conversation to conversation, probably not thinking twice about our brain’s ability to understand everything that is being said to us. How does the brain turn seemingly random sounds and letters into sentences with clear meaning?

Carnegie Mellon undergraduates Dan Eisenberg, Kevin Li and Ilya Brin have developed the EyeTable, which is described as “an artificially intelligent dinner table that reads physical gestures and speech patterns and lets the participants know how the date is going-in real time.

The Swedish design team TAT (The Astonishing Tribe), has demonstrated a 3D-eyetracking UI that tracks the position of our eyes and changes the display accordingly. This really gives a feeling that objects are behind one another. Earlier the team developed the look and feel of the T-Mobile G1’s user interface which included such innovations as the window shade menu and 9-point visual key-lock.

Apple has filed a patent for biometric authentication (checking after identification) including installation of a hidden sensor behind the screen that would recognize the user’s fingerprint when touched, and / or a front-facing camera for retinal recognition. The filing also suggests further possibilities, such as the device being capable of recognizing the user’s voice, or collecting DNA samples for recognition via genetic code.

Ford has filed a patent called “Emotive Text-to-Speech System and Method” describing a system that can not only simulate emotion when reading out directions and describing traffic problems, but could also detect the emotion of the operator of the car and interact with them in ways designed to, oh, soothe a little road rage. The avatar is said to “appear to become frustrated” if the driver is a lead-foot, and may say “Your driving is hurting my fuel efficiency.” Or, if a driver is going too fast, the dash-bound assistant could turn blue, ask what’s wrong, and suggest a more direct route to their destination.

Mitsubishi latest technology promises to detect the distance between a finger and the touch panel to allow for a whole host of new interface options. That’s done with the aid of an array of sensors that can also be used to calculate the speed at which the finger is approaching, and allow for a so-called “mouse-over function,” which would essentially let your finger control a cursor without actually touching the screen—something Mitsubishi says would be ideal for devices with small screens. Currently, it is just in prototype form (currently a 5.7-inch capacitive VGA display).