Chatbots.org Business News

Various airports (such as Paris, London, Birmingham and Manchester) are experimenting with so-called virtual boarding agents, these are virtual agents which for example kindly greet passengers when boarding or explain security measures before going through customs.

On Tuesday, September 13 at 1pm ET, virtual agent developer Next IT will host Conquer Customer Login Issues, a complimentary, educational webinar exploring online account creation and login issues, their effect on the customer experience, and ways that organizations are using technology to empower users to stay connected to their online accounts.

Having acquired skills of falling in synthetic love, making long-term cyber relationships, and playing pool with two hands, it’s time to take care of the artificial stamina! Recently, robots became active supporters of football and they began to play this most famous game in the world.

The virtual humans industry is growing very fast, as predicted the futurist Erwin van Lun and independent research companies such as Gartner or CCM Benchmark. Nevertheless, many advanced research projects, 3D human design methods or modeling techniques are not commonly known. Therefore, we would like to present three extraordinary state of the art examples of humanlike conversational artificial intelligence. They are expected to be adopted soon by the virtual humans industry.

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.

Virtual human Spike has its own beliefs and values. Additionally, it exhibits rude, pessimistic and confrontational behavior. Even a very cheerful person is not able to convince this virtual agent to chill out, relax or assimilate optimistic outlook. Would you like that Spike became your conversational friend?

VirtuOz, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online customer service, today announced that Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content and threat management solutions, celebrates the first anniversary of Lena, an intelligent virtual agent powered by VirtuOz, to provide world-class online customer and technical support.

VirtuOz, the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online customer service, appointed Laurent David as Head of Sales, France to support VirtuOz’ European growth and response to increased demand for intelligent virtual agents. With 22 years of successful sales experience in promoting the adoption of disruptive technologies, Laurent David is responsible for managing VirtuOz’s continued growth in France as well as expanding VirtuOz’ European presence.

The intelligent virtual agent (IVA) value proposition is so compelling for both the online consumer and the business provider that leading analyst firm Gartner Research predicts that virtual agents will be the standard technology for customer interactions in two to four years.  The aggressive adoption of IVAs is a consumer led revolution in which an increasingly large generation of users, including but not limited to digital natives, are living in an online world where blogging, texting, tweeting, eCommerce, and social networks are the way of life.  This Web savvy consumer prefers both their personal and business engagements to be conducted online.  The IVA offers a compelling customer experience that aligns with the consumer’s expectations.

Independent analyst firm CCM Benchmark predicts that virtual agent implementations will be an industry standard in 3 to 5 years, a critical component in customer services and even the main point of contact in 2014.

The firm surveyed 57 global ecommerce leaders in Q1 2011 on their plans for deploying virtual agents as part of their customer service strategy. This group predicts a 100% increase in virtual agents in 2011, with that number skyrocketing to 400% by 2014. Virtual agents are services such as an automated, intelligent, virtual human on a website, assisting consumers during purchases or for customer service in natural language, therefore also often referred as virtual assistants.

In addition to the growth predictions, the majority of respondents cited use of the virtual agent for “right channeling” purposes as the most promising emerging application. Integration of the AI avatars with live chat (66%) and use of the virtual assistant as the point of first contact for all online customer interactions (56%) gained the most interest.
This study meets findings from VirtuOz 2011 user conference, at which 75% of respondents agreed that virtual agents will be used as the first point of contact for online sales and service by 2014.

Additional value drivers highlighted in the study include:

• 67% note eDeflection from higher cost customer service channels as a key benefit of VAs.
• 51% believe that VAs will increase their “customer requests” handling capacity.
• 36% believe virtual agents will provide insight into user trends to determine and optimize new service issues as they arise.
• 33% believe that VAs will address search limitations.

“Ecommerce vendors serve on-line savvy consumers who are demanding more sophisticated self-service tools that offer a richer and more satisfying customer experience,” said Steve Adams, CEO and president of VirtuOz, a US/European provider of virtual agents for online customer service.

Chatbots.org also noted a steep rise of interest in the application of virtual assistants in customer services. The website lists all implementations of virtual humans across the world in three main categories: customer services, e-learning and gaming. The application in the customer service area is growing fast; in 2010, 95% of registered implementations were related to customer service and e-commerce.