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French software company Visuamobile has come out with a new application Eliza AI, a chatterbot for your iPhone using artificial intelligence software developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in 1966. It was amongst the first AI programs’ and now used as a basis by most computer generated speech programs. You can converse with her on your iPhone as if she was your therapist and like all good therapists, she will answer most questions with another question.

Now that the Predator drone has convinced the U.S. military of the power of killer robots, the Pentagon has put up a call for a loving, family-oriented artificial intelligence. The Department of Defense is soliciting proposals from small businesses for a computer program that would replicate troops serving abroad, during phone conversations and video conferences with their families.

Audi launches holographic virtual assistant named Christa In the Audi Centre in Sydney, Rosebery. She’ll appear life-size to send specific messages. Below the whole press release or click for video.

VirtuOz, the provider of intelligent, multilingual virtual support and sales agent solutions, today announced the completion of its Series B round of investment. MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures led the $11.4 million financing. Galileo Partners, which has funded the company since the beginning of its operations, participated in this round, as did Eric Hahn with Inventures Group. The new funds will be used to scale operations and advance product development.

VirtuOz solutions transform the customer support and sales experience online by providing intelligent virtual agents that interact with customers via chat and instant messaging. The agents enable ubiquitous, personal and natural interactions between humans and Internet-based services on a 24/7 basis. The combination of artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies make the agents capable of understanding a complete range of user requests and comments. The agents welcome, guide, assist, and inform customers and are able to reach specific sales objectives by proposing a personalized and direct link when appropriate.

Researchers at Brown University have created a robot that recognizes human gestures such as ‘stop’ and ‘follow’.

Humans may soon be able to develop long-term relationships with virtual humans that are capable of reading and adapting to our emotions, say French researchers.

Professor Catherine Pelachaud, director of research from the Paris Institute of Technology presented her research this week at a meeting of the ARC Network in Human Communication Science in Sydney.

Pelachaud and colleagues are developing virtual humans, Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), that can act autonomously in a virtual environment. As well as speaking, the agents communicate with facial expressions, head movements, hand gestures and gaze.

They are working on virtual agent that can be taught to detect, via a webcam, the emotion of a person looking at the screen.

Astute Solutions announced today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a Notice of Allowance for the company’s RealDialog patent. The patent covers automated customer service via an intelligent virtual agent that is trained using customer-agent conversations.

Human-assisted support has traditionally provided a higher quality of customer service than machine-assisted support, but it is far more expensive due to labor costs such as high turnover rates, training expenditures and rectifying human errors. To avoid these escalating expenditures, companies are opting to reduce costs by implementing self-service solutions. Self-service, however, can go only so far in rectifying customer issues.

Google has released 24 translatations chatbots for their IM platform Google talk.

If you want to try it for Chinese, just add .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Chinese. You can use it as an interpreter in your group chat, or as a pocket translator in your Google Talk client for BlackBerry.

The image shows Sukhdeep Singh experimenting with this bot in Hindi.

Those entering online dating forums risk having more than their hearts stolen. A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums, according to security software firm PC Tools.

Speech recognition technology has matured to a stage where it can be used to increase the efficiency of a call centre and provide a better customer experience, according to research from Callcentres.net.

Dr Catriona Wallace, director of Callcentres.net, told ZDNet Australia that according to a recent survey carried out by her firm, of 500 Australians asked if they minded speaking with an offshore call centre agent, 67 percent said they did.