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Trying to recognize actionable intelligence from the countless conversations taking place in the social web can be a bit like trying to find a needle in the proverbial haystack, particularly if your customers use multiple languages.

Every day, the social web grows in size and influence with consumers. Facebook and Twitter have millions of users, which means millions of opportunities for companies to promote their products and gauge market trends.

But trying to recognize actionable intelligence from the countless conversations taking place in the social web can be a bit like trying to find a needle in the proverbial haystack, particularly if your customers use multiple languages.

English makes up only about 40 percent of global social media postings, so companies that ignore this language diversity are at greater risk of being caught off-guard by trends or developments that could impact their business.

Now that Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, is well know to the world, users are starting to ask themselves what to do with this technology and what’s the next step.

Can someone use a text-speech application that not only turns your words into speech but also translate them to language that you might not speak? Now, you can!

With this article I would like to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how a system like Elbot is enhanced with new capabilities. I’ll do this by walking through one of Elbot’s newer features: color learning. If you would like to try the feature before reading all the spoilers, please visit Elbot.com, and ask Elbot if he can learn.

On 4th April 2012, Creative Virtual hosted an enlightening webinar with Forrester Research, How Virtual Agent Innovations Can Benefit Your Mobile, Web, Call Centre and Social Channels.  The event was a huge success with a turnout of over 100 attendees from around the world.  The event was hosted by Forrester Research analyst Diane Clarkson and Richard Simons, CEO of Creative Virtual USA.

A recent blog post by a tech writer compared the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology that is behind Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) like Ann at Aetna or Jenn at Alaska to the hologram technology used to resurrect Tupac for Coachella. The comparison sheds light on the reality that people – tech writers included – still do not understand that conversational NLP technologies in the form of IVAs are more than a voice, face and search. Could anyone at Coachella have a conversation with Holo-pac?  No. Or would the same comparison be made of Siri? Siri doesn’t have a face, so probably not.

Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy from University of Louisville says that we should be aware of dangerously self-aware chatbots and he suggests to keep dangerous AI entities in virtual prison for avoiding social-engineering attacks. According to him, we should improve cybersecurity, because one day disobeying virtual agents could threaten humanity’s existence.

Dr. Roman V. Yampolski from University of Louisville claims that artificial conversational entities, shopping bots, and intelligent software applications became closer in their abilities and intelligence to human beings. Therefore arised the need to recognize and verify the identity of such entities just like it is necessary to authenticate the identity of people.

New, future oriented field of artimetrics, i.e. artificial biometrics, focuses on recognition, verification, and authentication of virtual agents, robots and other nonbiological entities. As a sub-field of cybersecurity, artimetrics is being developed in Cyber-Security Lab, which prides itself on being the world’s first to conduct this kind of research.

This video shows two animated speaking chatbots talking to other. I don’t know the creator nor something about the technology used for AI components, speech technology or avatar animation. I assume that the dialogue is a text to text interaction and that the speech is synthesized (i.e. the speech itself of the other chatterbot is not interpreted).

ASR (Automated Speech Recognition) is definitely the next step. I’m waiting for it!

According to Gartner, in a few years 85% of customer-company relationships will be made without human mediation. To reach that goal we need Virtual Avatars to be more intelligent than they are nowadays.

FIONA (Framework for Interactive-services Over Natural-conversational Agents)  is a global online platform for the creation of Intelligent and Interactive Virtual Avatars.

FIONA’s first beta version is going to be launched soon and we are searching for beta testers. If you work on human computer interaction and artificial intelligence, you are 3D Designer, you have TTS or ASR modules, or you create virtual agents, you can become a beta tester. You only have to register in http://www.sparkingtogether.com.