Chatbots.org Business News

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.

Kate is a virtual customer-service representative created to help people visiting the AT&T Premier Store. The Premier Store is where AT&T Business Customers and Individual Responsibility Users can manager their accounts and shop online for great deals on the latest wireless devices, plans and accessories.

Definitions of ‘virtual agent’ within the chatbot industry seem to vary according to developer’s objectives. In interviews between CRM Magazine and three virtual agent companies, the following definitions of virtual agent were identified:

• Mark Gaydos, vice president of worldwide marketing at VirtuOz: The ability to interact with a customer and, in a sense, understand what the customer wants to do and guide them to an answer to their question.
• David Lloyd, CEO of IntelliResponse: It is a way of interacting and delivering customer self-service.
• Ashutosh Roy, chairman and CEO of eGain: A virtual agent is a human-like bot that understands natural language interactions and guides a visitor though a conversational interface using text and/or speech input and output.

What would happen when various individual virtual agents cooperate and process data through interdisciplinary systems?

According to an article of David Hunter Tow, Director of the Future Planet Research Centre, interactive virtual agents could end up playing a huge role in saving the planet and its evolution could grow exponentially.

Online shoppers are easily overwhelmed by the large number of products, arcane technical specifications, and conflicting reviews. This is especially true for people buying a new computer. A New York-based startup SalesClark LLC wants to reduce shoppers’ information overload during this holiday season by employing a virtual shopping assistant.

SalesClark is a virtual assistant that chats with online shoppers in order to quickly find the best and cheapest fit for their needs. At www.salesclark.com, you can describe in plain English what you are looking for. For example, you can type “I need a small laptop good for traveling, writing, and checking e-mails.”

The white paper aims to help organisations and businesses understand what chatbots are, how they are being used to win more customers, grow revenues, improve customer satisfaction and reduce cost.

A new white paper on deploying chatbots has been released by virtual worlds and chatbot solutions provider Daden Limited. The white paper aims to help organisations and businesses understand what chatbots are, how they are being used to win more customers, grow revenues, improve customer satisfaction and reduce cost.

Chatbots are known by a wide variety of terms including virtual assistants and virtual agents. Some are quite sophisticated whilst others offer no more than a simple site guide and although the concept of chatbots have been around since the 1950’s it is only in the last five years or so that early adopters, such as Ikea, have been using them. They are however growing in popularity and the E Commerce Times reported in June that “approximately 10% of the Fortune 1,000 already have them”.

Daden have over a decades worth of experience of working with chatbot technology and speech systems. “We have seen an increasing interest in chatbots and chatbot technology over the last three years - so much so we felt the time was right to issue a white paper to help demystify the subject and explain the different types of chatbots.” said Daden’s Managing Director David Burden.

The Chatbots 3.0 conference in Philadelphia was a huge success.  We had about 25 attendees and 11 high quality presentations. A number of people who were unable to attend have made requests to see the presentations.  We have asked the speakers to submit links to their talks so that you can view them.

Richard Wallace, Pandorabots - Pandorabots overview (ppt, windows, mac, PDF)

An increasing number of Fortune500 companies have started to use Virtual Agents - Avatars to enhance their customer experience and decrease eCommerce drop rates.

Register NOW for this unique 60min web event - webinar - to learn about Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know Regarding Contemporary, Enterprise Avatars (but did not have the opportunity to ask).

• How are Virtual Agents used by top-tier companies like Comcast?
• How this tech enhances service and eCommerce platforms?
• How much an intelligent Avatar costs?
• Can I have my CEO as a customized Avatar?

Watch Forrester, Comcast and InteliWISE answer these and many more key questions, by attending a complimentary webinar (on May 19, 2010 at 11:00 am PDT, 2:00 pm EDT).

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!

VirtuOz, the provider of virtual agent solutions, announced today that the company grew rapidly in 2009, posting record sales as a result of accelerated new customer adoption and expanded use of VirtuOz at existing customers in both North America and Europe.