Chatbots.org Business News

Having acquired skills of falling in synthetic love, making long-term cyber relationships, and playing pool with two hands, it’s time to take care of the artificial stamina! Recently, robots became active supporters of football and they began to play this most famous game in the world.

Ecreation, an interactive media agency, introduced http://www.chatbot4u.com. By using this new service, now anyone can create a virtual chat partner, by following a few simple steps. These so-called chatbots can be used on websites, in social media and on instant messengers. Chatbot4U offers entertainment for consumers and interesting opportunities for businesses.

Artificial Solutions announced today that one of its Teneo Virtual Assistants has been shortlisted as a 2011 finalist in the Best Use of Technology category, in the prestigious European Call Centre and Customer Service Awards. Emma, Telenor Sweden’s busiest customer service agent, answers nearly five thousand questions everyday on Telenor’s website.

Developed in response to Telenor’s rapidly growing network, a Scandinavian wide price war and a need to provide 24/7 online support, Emma answers all kinds of questions from mobile services to troubleshooting SIM card issues. As a Teneo Virtual Assistant, Emma uses the world’s most robust natural language interaction (NLI) engine that enables her to reason like a human using advanced linguistic and business rules to decide how best to respond a customer’s request. With each interaction Emma dynamically re-assesses content to understand what has changed and give the right answers.

How to model a human-to-robot romantic relationship? Just a few elements will do: artificial emotional hormones, intelligent affective system and probabilistic parameters of love between humans and the robot…

If you take this course, you will be graded just like Stanford University students, and you can get a certificate matching your skills to the Stanford grading curve. Though online, it is a serious class: 8 homework assignments, 2 timed exams and many hard deadlines. To pass this class, expect to work at least 10 hours per week - Stanford students do all this! Become one of them starting in September 2011.

Companies today are searching for ways to save money while providing optimal customer experiences. As a result, an increasing number of organizations are turning to live chat and virtual assistants.

With such benefits as contact center deflections, increases in agent productivity, and gains in customer satisfaction, chat makes sound fiscal sense while serving as a tool to enhance the customer experience. In fact, a recent Forrester Research study estimated the average ROI for proactive chat is105 percent.

Jeff Brown, executive vice president of sales at Next IT, says that more and more companies are buying in to the concept of chat and virtual assistants after finding that static FAQs and video tutorials aren’t always tailored to customers’ individual questions and needs, thus failing to offer a deeply engaging experience. As a result, the thinking is now, ” ‘How do I extend my brand reach out to where I can engage clients and have a dialogue with them?’” Brown says.

That focus on customer experience is a primary reason companies are now evolving their use of chat from a reactive tool that helps online customers with questions or moves them through the checkout process when they get stuck, to a more proactive approach that entails making customers aware about individually tailored products, services, or discounts when they first land on a site. “People don’t want to just be cross-sold to; they want to be aware of the value-add,” Brown says.

Two companies in very different industries, Aetna and HauteLook, demonstrate that the value of virtual assistants and live chat reaches far beyond helping with navigational issues. They’ve become valuable proactive communication tools to help improve the customer experience.

The virtual humans industry is growing very fast, as predicted the futurist Erwin van Lun and independent research companies such as Gartner or CCM Benchmark. Nevertheless, many advanced research projects, 3D human design methods or modeling techniques are not commonly known. Therefore, we would like to present three extraordinary state of the art examples of humanlike conversational artificial intelligence. They are expected to be adopted soon by the virtual humans industry.

Virtual agents’  reasoning and actions are tightly connected with their awareness ability helping to relate to the environment during a conversation. Researchers invented the combination of virtual reality and artificial intelligence techniques to simulate living conversational agents being aware of themselves, the virtual world around them, and other virtual beings existing in that environment.

Conversational virtual humans are nowadays applied to the field of neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology. The technology has evolved to a point where researchers may begin developing mental health applications that make use of virtual reality patients. Human patients with acute neurological illnesses are often confused and unable to cooperate with clinicians during medical consultations. Imagine a simulated training with virtual humans having real mental disorders, willing to talk to their doctors, and sharing their emotions!

An innovative business case calculator has been created by technology company Daden Limited to help organisations understand the potential savings that using an interactive virtual agent – or chatbot - can deliver.

Chatbots are computer applications that can act as a first line of support providing instant responses to questions, without the need for staff intervention, reducing pressure on resources. Available 24 hours a day, seven days a week they can also collect information, provide links to pages and answer queries using natural language conversation, whilst allowing human staff to focus on more complex queries.

Research has shown that the average cost-per-contact using a chatbot is under 60p, compared to over £3.50 for live text-chat or over £4 for a telephone contact – almost 84% reduction in costs.  But clients often want to know what the actual benefits and savings would be for their own business.