Chatbots.org Business News

The 2012 Loebner Prize contest will take place in Bletchley Park on Tuesday 15th May 2012 to mark Alan Turing’s centenary celebrations.  The contest is being run by David Levy who won the prize in 1997 and 2009.

A team from the University of Exeter’s Computer Science department (Dr Ed Keedwell, Max Dupenois and Kent McClymont) will be running a webcast of the Loebner Prize and so, for the first time, interested people from around the world will be able to follow the conversations the judges have as they happen.

The URL will be http://loebner.exeter.ac.uk/2012contest/

Would you trust health advice dispensed by a computer rather than a human physician? Despite the obvious challenges of using artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, researchers have long held that AI can give hard-pressed healthcare professionals a helping hand.

Tensator is committed to becoming the global leader in the management of the Customer Journey. With holographic projections of virtual boarding agents already greeting passengers at:
London Luton Airport, Birmingham Airport, Bristol Airport, Edinburgh Airport,Dubai Airport and Frankfurt Airport, the global interest in sophisticatedly improved customer travel experience is growing.

What is the exact history of holographic airport announcers evolution?

Cara Santa Maria of the Huffington post interviews William Swartout, Director of Technology of USC/ICT about the application of virtual humans. Very funny!

Creative Virtual is excited to announce that they recently become the Chatbots.org Advanced Business Member with the most contribution points. Chatbots.org is a website set up and maintained by Erwin Van Lun and his team as an industrial catalyst to advance the industry of Intelligent Virtual Characters. In 2011, Chatbots.org launched their Advanced Membership Program which allows companies to become more visible on the site, complete an enhanced membership profile and have access to statistics on their profile including lead reporting. Contribution points are earned by individuals associated with the company for activities such as adding new virtual assistant listings, submitting items for the business news section and leaving comments in various areas around the site. All companies added to the site as being involved with Intelligent Virtual Characters in some capacity are included on the Companies page with Advanced Business Members appearing at the top of the list sorted by years of commitment and contribution points.

Earlier this year Gartner predicted that by 2015 “50 percent of online customer self-service search activities will be via a virtual assistant for at least 1,500 large enterprises”. Interestingly, one of the main challenges the release cited was not a customer’s willingness to interact with an automated mechanism, but the ability for it to maintain an interesting dialogue.

KANA Software, Inc., a global leader of customer service solutions used by more than 600 enterprises including half of the Global 100 and more than 200 government agencies, today announced it has completed its acquisition of privately held Trinicom, a provider of cloud-based web customer service (WCS) and customer interaction software. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Trinicom, based in the Netherlands, serves more than 200 predominantly mid-sized organizations in both the public and private sector, offering fast, efficient access to comprehensive and multi-channel WCS capabilities such as knowledge management, web self-service, social communities, live chat and virtual assistant technology, as well as call, campaign and email response management – all from a single on-demand cloud application.

The acquisition expands KANA’s customer and revenue base and strengthens its product portfolio. KANA will continue to support new and existing Trinicom customers, as well as accelerate the development of Trinicom core capabilities, and expand its market reach to mid-sized businesses globally.

BECU, the nation’s fourth-largest credit union, and Next IT, the largest U.S.-based provider of Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs), today announced that BECU has implemented Next IT’s Access Assistant, an online tool designed to help BECU members reconnect to their accounts if they forget their login information or are locked out.