Chatbots.org Business News

VirtuOz, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online customer service, today announced that it has raised $7 million in additional funding from existing investors Mohr Davidow, Inventures Group and Galileo Partners to finance growth in the U.S. and E.U.

VirtuOz, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online customer service, today announced it was named a finalist in the Best New Software as a Service of the Year category in The 2011 American Business Awards. The American Business Awards are the nation’s premier business awards program. All organizations operating in the U.S.A. are eligible to submit nominations – public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small. More than 2,800 nominations from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted this year for consideration across 40 categories.

Virtual agents are an innovative response to growing consumer demand for personalized self-service options accessible via today’s preferred online channels – the web, mobile devices and Facebook. VirtuOz intelligent virtual agent solutions use patented natural language processing and predictive intent analysis to realistically emulate a conversation with a human being online and provide timely and effective resolution to consumer issues. Gartner research predicts that intelligent virtual agents will be a new standard for customer interaction in the next 2-4 years.

By integrating VirtuOz Virtual Agent with their call center, Discountéo, the French equivalent of Best Buy, is able to deliver a compelling digital customer relationship with 100 percent customer resolution.

VirtuOz announced that the company processed a record 144 million conversations in 2010 on behalf of its customers, indicating increased adoption of virtual agent solutions by both companies and their users. In addition, the company announced 150 percent growth in the number of global companies headquartered in the US using its virtual agent solutions, complementing its historically strong performance in the EU.

IVA-2010 is an interdisciplinary annual conference and the main forum for presenting research on modeling, developing and evaluating intelligent virtual agents with a focus on communicative abilities and social behavior. The conference encourages a spectrum of presentations from theoretical issues to working applications. Researchers in human-human and human-robot interaction are also welcome to share work relevant to intelligent virtual agents.

Intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) are (in the definition of the organisation) interactive characters that exhibit human-like qualities and communicate with humans or with each other using natural human modalities such as behavior, gesture and speech. IVAs are capable of real-time perception, cognition and action that allow them to participate in a dynamic social environment.

It is being held September 20-22, 2010, in Philadelphia, USA.

Last year I’ve attended the conference in Amsterdam and it was awesome! Truely awesome. You can still expect our report on Chatbots.org, which in a more academic context than we currently present ourselves. The realtime emotion aware parameterized avatar system of Steve DiPaola was a video report of things we’ve experienced in Amsterdam. Furthermore, we’ve attened the IVA GALA 2009 awards and we’ll soon make sure the participants and winners are uploaded to the 2009 page of IVA GALA. It’s all coming up!

2010 will be a great year for the virtual agent/chatbot researchers and businesses!