Chatbots.org Business News

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.”

Don’t try to argue about climate change on Twitter…Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW will track you down and will respond to you with links to scientific sources to counter attack your arguments about global warming.

AI will be the next big thing in the call/contact centre and customer service industry. This is not Star Wars, nor some other fictional high tech dream.  It’s here today and is growing like wildfire. The adoption rate of those business, education and government organisations that have conducted pilots has been very high due to a ROI of less than six months and a TCO that has been documented to be as high as 60%.

Like most unusual technologies, it will start out slowly but will take the market by storm once the early adopters prove its true value.  These adopters will be the big winners in this technology infusion, getting a jump on their competition.  Especially in the outsourcing industry.  It is already being used by many of the early adopters in the self-sourcing community and has proven itself quickly.  The capabilities and cost savings will drive this new technology forward on a natural course.  This will only take one to two years from today to get established and within five years will encompass the entire market.

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.

My chatbot, Suzette, won this year’s Loebner Prize contest and even confused a judge into voting for her over a human (or should I say he confused himself). But here is the blow-by-blow of this weird event.

When I arrived at the contest, I figured I had good odds to win if nothing went horribly wrong. Yes, Suzette had easily qualified over the 3 other competitors (her score 11 pts, the nearest competitor 7.5). Her design and data naturally gave her an edge over her competitors on the human knowledge test questions of the qualifiers. But human judge chat was an entirely different matter than the qualification test. Still, I felt she could carry on a detailed conversation better than the others and should win.

Initial installation of the programs occurred on Friday. From prechat conversations with the other contestants I learned that A.L.I.C.E. came with 3 redundant disks. Yet all three turned out to be blank! What a scare that must have been. Dr Wallace managed to install by retrieving the program over the Internet. Cleverbot is now at 45 million lines of memorized user chat (at a rate of doubling every year). And UltraHal is now listening to tweets, so has 300K of user chat it learned and 400K of tweets it has accepted for learning (code decides if the user has had enough responses and doesn’t trigger any red flags).