Chatbots.org Business News

The ALICE A.I. Foundation has released a demo of Three Bots Talking.

Chatbot ALICE, chatbot Fake Captain Kirk and chat bot Fake Spock chat together to generate spontaneous, interactive drama. Some of it make no sense, some of it is hilarious, but all of it is highly entertaining. You never know where the conversations is headed with these three.

Three Bots Talking is built on Pandorabots AIML technology in conjunction with Oddcast Sitepal avatars.

Created by VirtuOz, this intelligent animated character appears on the home page of the site, providing a human-like interface between users and the Michelin brand. The Michelin Man is the first world-famous brand icon to interact with users in this way.

Chatting in both English and French, Michelin’s two official languages, and programmed to converse on around 10,000 topics each month, this intelligent virtual agent answers questions about the Michelin Man as well as the company, while also helping visitors to find their way around the site.

What happens when two chatbots chat? Researchers from
Cornell Creative Machines Lab headed by Professor Hod Lipson at Cornell University have recently submitted this entertaining idea to this year’s Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence. Objective of this competition is to fool 2 or more judges into thinking that a chatbot is a human being.

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.

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.

Blog Post recalling a conversation that Daden’s own chatbot Abi had.

Google Labs has initiated a new project called Google Talk Guru, a so-called search engine chatbot. It sounds promising; however at this stage you can only enquire about 7 topics:

noHold, developer of the most interactive and diagnostic Virtual Agent technology, has the ability to embed a Virtual Agent directly into social media platforms, Facebook integration for ViewSonic serves as the first example.

As social media increasingly becomes a hub for customer interaction and support, noHold aims to help businesses cover these channels with Virtual Agent implementations. With a few simple lines of code, the same Virtual Agent that runs on a company website can assist end-users within their favorite mode of social media, such as Facebook. This provides end-users with an extra layer of interactivity and support, without the time needed to implement a second Virtual Agent.

Research shows that chatbots stimulate a positive state of mind among their users. As a result users enjoy more pleasure in performing their activities and spend more time on performing them. According to ‘social response theory’, the ‘social cues’ send by chatbots increase the users’ involvement in interacting with a computer. As a consequence chatbots contribute to a more personal perception of the online experience.

What is the perfect term for those seemingly intelligent ‘things’, which are popping up everywhere, and which feel more ‘natural’ as time goes by?

Well, we have found 161 synonyms (161!!! No typo!!).

As the leading business and research community in humanlike conversational artificial intelligence, we hope to increase understanding of this field, to provoke discussion and to initiate discussion on standardization of this huge list of different terms, some of them with slightly different implications but mostly genuine synonyms.

We are introducing the most popular, excellent candidate terms to be adopted by the industry and those synonyms which are really eye catching or controversial, and we will just list the remaining synonyms.