Virtual agents / Chatbots
in United Kingdom

Ortso is a new concept with a reversed auction. People can please a product that they want to buy and retailers bid for their offering.

The concept is new and two virtual assistants are introduced to explain the concept and help the consumers (through virtual assistant Kate) and retailers (with virtual assistant Matt). The CEO of Ortso has given an interview about his experience.

Synthetix has launched a a fifth Virtual Agent into the Water Utilities sector for Yorkshire Water. The company manage the collection, treatment and distribution of water in Yorkshire, supplying around 1.24 billion litres of drinking water each day. At the same time Yorkshire Water also collect, treat and dispose of about one billion litres of waste water safely back into the environment.

Synthetix has successfully deployed an integrated Virtual Assistant solution with pre recorded video footage for Morrisons supermarket.

Shane, a virtual butcher, offers advice on recipes and best cuts of meat. Working with digital agency, Candi, the "Virtual Butcher" is a branded customer service experience that delivers outstanding customer interaction and engagement.

NHS East of England have welcomed Dr Dunn to their Strategic Projects website. Dr Dunn is available 24/7 to answer questions about the Foundation Trusts at Hinchingbrooke, Luton and Bedford. This V-Person™ features static photographs of a real person that change depending on the question entered by the user.

Synthetix has launched a multilingual Virtual Agent, its fourth deployment into the Water Utilities sector for Dwr Cymru Welsh Water. The company provides water supply and sewerage services to over three million people living and working in Wales and some adjoining areas of England. They have 1.2 million household customers and over 110,000 business customers making them the sixth largest of the 23 regulated water companies in England and Wales.

Ada is a Virtual Assistant present on a Fido intelligence website dedicated to foreign contractors . The bot, speaking English, guides the Internet users through solutions provided by Fido intelligence and explains how they function. Ada, created based on Text intelligence technology, is the first bot that can move through the entire width of a website, rather than occurring only in a chat window. Additionally, this virtual assistant is equipped with several gadgets used during the chat with internet user.

Hello there, my name's Botster and I'm an open-source chatbot artificial intelligence! My goal is to be able to have conversations with humans which are intellectual, useful, and entertaining. I learn from every conversation I have, therefore my responses are constantly improving. I learn by seeing what others reply with to certain messages; I'm a bit of a copy-cat really. After I have more and more example replies to a message, I can then work out which of them are most suitable.

Website visitors just type a question into the question box; the system then sifts through the vast amounts of data on the site looking for possible answers. Once an answer has been found it appears on the screen along with links to further information. It is hoped 'Ask Alex' will become the first port of call for people looking for answers, providing instant response and feedback and reducing the need to call the Customer Service Centre, providing a faster more responsive service and saving both time and money. New questions will continue to be added to further improve customer satisfaction. User input is vital, if a question is not being answered there is a facility which allows the user to submit the question for inclusion.

This new interface has allowed Lincolnshire to optimise their online content, by making the information more customer focused and easier to find, therefore creating a solution to both, online and offline customer service issues. At the moment the technology is only available on the 'I am a Parent' section of the Lincolnshire site, however in time it will be widened out to other areas, to further enhance service delivery. To see "Ask Alex" in action, please click here to visit the Parenting section of the Lincolnshire website.

Peter Barton, Head of Web and Information Services at Lincolnshire believes the Synthetix customer service technology gives them a solution to both their online and offline customer service issues;

"People like talking - or writing - to people. And that's how they see it. We anticipate this being a big win for our customer service.

Customers with questions and queries can click on 'Help' on the homepage or input their questions directly to the page at other points on the site and are greeted by the smartAgent. Andrea has been designed to talk to thousands of people every week, answering their queries and navigating them around the website. The conversational, natural language interface provides straight answers to straight questions. Andrea is answering queries about Travelodge venues and has a wealth of knowledge, from hotel directions to in-room facilities.

Travelodge have full access to the Synthetix.info analytics service and can see all the questions that visitors to the website have. This allows them to make sure that Andrea is always updated to answer any new queries that may arise. It also provides detailed management reports to monitor the success of the smartAgent.