Chatbots.org Business News

An online game promoting the new movie Sherlock Holmes is offering players a new sort of gaming experience. The aim is to interview suspects - as Dr Watson or Holmes - to solve a robbery at the British Museum. Thanks to novel conversational “chatbots” embedded in the game, players can use natural language in their typed interrogations.

Other games have used natural language interactions before, says Rollo Carpenter, founder of Existor, the company behind the game, but these only use keywords to try to recognise what players are saying, he claims. “My script technology works by making predictions about what people will say,” he says. It then uses statistical analysis and fuzzy logic to try to find the best match for what was said against this vast number of predictions, before supplying the appropriate response.

Ever realized that not only humans are culturally bounded, but virtual agents as well? Practices that are completely accepted in some cultures would totally be rejected by other cultures. Even when they are part of so-called viral campaigns, which tend to be a little bit shocking. However, at Chatbots.org we believe learning starts with openness and sharing. So be prepared!

We’ve stumbled upon Anna and Adam, virtual agents (chatbots or virtual assistants if you prefer) of Polish company Inpost. Both Anna and Adam can be undressed if you know the codes! In fact, for non-Polish speaking people, it would come across as a code; for Polish natives it’s about answering questions about Inpost’s new service called paczkomat. They learn by interacting with Anna or Adam.

In most cultures, this kind of practice would be highly unusual for established brands like InPost. Note that Inpost is not a silly new web startup: They are the first company in Poland offering postal services throughout the country via its own units, represented in 200 cities of Poland via 800 Customer Service Points. Inpost is part of the Integer.pl group which is listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Anna was developed by a large virtual agent developer in Poland named Stanusch Technologies.

Wanna undress Anna or Adam yourself or checkout the video? Click below for the codes.

The future of chatbots is just starting to unfold. Numerous applications are developed and one of Chatbots.org objectives is to find and test new chatbots and their capabilities.
For example, I have tested every chatbot compatible to America Online’s Instant Messenger which are displayed at AIM’s online gallery.

WowWee was founded in 1988 as an independent research and development and manufacturing company, focused on cutting-edge technologies. The introduction of WowWee’s Robosapien™ robot in 2004 revolutionized the way we interact with entertainment robotic companions.

One of the most popular entertainment robots in the world, with global sales of more than 5 million units, the Robosapien robot was the first commercially-available biomorphic robot - a fusion of technology and personality.

This comprehensive robot control interface relies solely on finger swipes, taps, and presses.

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Previously the construction of believable characters based on artificial intelligence required hand-crafting thousands of sentences - aimed at creating a high-quality chat bot brain. A few creative people took up the challenge and authored some of the best chat bots around today. Until now, the tedious and expensive process of developing and training a high-quality believable chat bot remained a significant hurdle to widespread chat bot adoption.

The new, patent-pending Pandorabots SpellBinderTM technology reduces chat bot creation time enormously. Pandorabots SpellBinder automatically learns from conversational transcripts. Nothing else on the market today can create high-quality and unique chat bot characters as quickly and efficiently as Pandorabots SpellBinder (Synthetic PErsonality Language Learning for Bot Intelligence from Natural Dialog Example Recordings).

This year’s Loebner Prize winning entry, Do-Much-More, now has its own web site at www.worldsbestchatbot.com

Please visit the site to learn more about the chatbot and to see some of the transrcipts from the Loebner competition in Brighton.

In April 2009 Chatiquette was published in Dutch by Floris van der Veen, founder and CEO of LiveCom. In addition to this book I would like to give some suggestions to companies who are currently using chat and show them the potential functionality of chatbots.

If you decide to use chat as one of your communication tools to interact with your customers, you might like to consider using a chatbot. A chatbot can filter your customer responses and give your customers chat services 24/7.

Three months after release 2.0, we are very proud to present version 2.5 of Chatbots.org.

Version 2.5 features all chatbots and/ or related AI awards, a special ‘feature profiles’ section highlighting everyone who has willingly shared their AI knowledge and a brand new design of the Chatbots.org header, including animated favicon and cute Twitter animation. In addition, the speed of the website has considerably increased.

How creative will intelligent life be? Will computers be creative? Will chatbots be creative? In my opinion, computers will be more intelligent, more creative, and will have more humour than any human in the world. It’s just a matter of time.