Chatbots.org Business News

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Recent research on context-aware computing, such as avatars, has shown many benefits for businesses. According to Virtuoz vice president Mark Gaydos there are 4 ways how avatar virtual agents can help companies (from allbusiness.com)

With James Cameron’s highly anticipated sci-fi movie Avatar opening this weekend, we had to find out if avatars can help businesses in the real world as much as they help humans in fictitious alien worlds.

Unlike the 10-foot tall blue avatars in Cameron’s movie, Web site avatars aren’t science fiction; they’re “real” virtual agents that provide customer service worldwide. These self-service software applications (which can appear as an animation or a picture of a real person) are intelligent, engaging personalities that help Internet customers find solutions faster and more efficiently.

The Michelin Man avatar, for example, not only answers questions about Michelin tires, but can also engage in conversations about how old he is and whether he has a girlfriend.

AIDA is one of the latest intelligent driving virtual agents which aims to change the way we interact with our car and communicates with the driver through a small robot embedded in the dashboard. AIDA is a sociable robot, which reads the driver’s mood from facial coding and through emotion capturing and responds in a socially appropriate and informative way.

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In a recent issue of Technology Review Magazine published by MIT listed Intelligent Virtual Agents as one of the 10 emerging technologies of 2009. Intelligent virtual agents are able to interact intelligently with users, reduce support costs, encourage self-service and customer loyalty, and serve as a branding tool for the enterprise. They provide a unique, interactive and personal way for users to get answers and assistance on your website, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This press release seems to be sponsored by Botégo.