Chatbots.org Business News

There are up to 4 PhD postitions in Speech Technology and Communication open at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, which is Sweden’s leading research and education institution in Information Technology, with activities at both KTH and Stockholm University.

The goal of the positions is to contribute to the research foundation for speech technology in tomorrow’s conversational systems. A central research area is spoken interaction with artefacts like robots and avatars in virtual environments, based on human-like communication models. Face-to-face interaction implies audiovisual communication, where visual signals from face and body movements are of great importance.

Websites have become the service channel of choice for an increasing number of customers and citizens. Studies show that people prefer to visit websites when they need to solve an issue, gather information or make a purchasing decision. Yet, what’s missing from the online experience is the personal service that differentiates the web experience and guides the visitor to the information or solution that they are looking for. Industry analysts have identified that a new generation of Virtual Assistants (intelligent website avatars)  can offer this personal touch.

Children with autism can develop skills they normally find difficult by interacting with virtual worlds. By using multitouch, these children activate a virtual character on a screen and experiment with different social scenarios. This way, researchers can compare their responses to those displayed in real-life situations.

It’s that time of the year again: children writing up their wishlists for the upcoming holidays. Ecreation once again enables kids to chat with their favorite holiday characters: Saint Nicholas who is a local custom on the 5th of December in the Netherlands and Belgium, and Santa Claus who visits most children worldwide during Christmas.

Since today Dutch speaking children can chat again with Saint Nicholas - known locally as Sinterklaas - by adding his address to their Live Messenger. A chatbot that has been programmed to act like the real Saint, responds to children with witty remarks and a sense of humor. Kids can play games with him, listen and sing-a-long to his songs, and even find recipes to make candy which is associated with the popular holiday, celebrated each year on the 5th of December. Boys and girls can even report naughty friends to the Saint! Since his “resurrection” in 2006, over 200,000 people had a chat with Sinterklaas.

Additionally, as Santa Claus will make an appearance again on Live Messenger in December. This chatterbot is speaking English and has a similar range of useful Christmas related functionalities.

“Each year the Sinterklaas and Santa chatbots are a huge success, ” says Sjoerd van Dijk of Ecreation, developer of these chatbots. “It enables children to have a fun time chatting and interacting with their favorite holiday characters, each year they are having a fun time using all the possible activities and functionalities.”

MyCyberTwin, a new generation of artificial intelligence technology, today announced the launch of its Turing Test Challenge. The contest gives developers the needed tools and instruction to leverage MyCybertwin’s AI Platform to build intelligent virtual agents (IVA’s) and compete head-to-head with other developer agents.

Wikipedia defines the ‘Turing Test’ as a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior. It was first introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence highlighting the ability for machines to think. 

“Developers love working with new technology platforms. They are constantly looking for state-of-the-art products and services they can perfect,” said Liesl Capper, CEO. “Thanks to the inspirational work by the likes of Alan Turing, and the recent launch of Siri, today artificial intelligence is ready for prime time and quickly be adopted by businesses.  The ‘Turing Test Challenge’ allows developer to take advantage of MyCyberTwin’s AI solutions to build virtual agents to compete against other developers. Since creating this concept, the response we have already gotten is tremendous.  We are extremely excited to see what happens when developers get their hands on our technology.” 

The ALICE A.I. Foundation has released a demo of Three Bots Talking.

Chatbot ALICE, chatbot Fake Captain Kirk and chat bot Fake Spock chat together to generate spontaneous, interactive drama. Some of it make no sense, some of it is hilarious, but all of it is highly entertaining. You never know where the conversations is headed with these three.

Three Bots Talking is built on Pandorabots AIML technology in conjunction with Oddcast Sitepal avatars.

Created by VirtuOz, this intelligent animated character appears on the home page of the site, providing a human-like interface between users and the Michelin brand. The Michelin Man is the first world-famous brand icon to interact with users in this way.

Chatting in both English and French, Michelin’s two official languages, and programmed to converse on around 10,000 topics each month, this intelligent virtual agent answers questions about the Michelin Man as well as the company, while also helping visitors to find their way around the site.

MyCyberTwin, a new generation of artificial intelligence technology, today announced the launch of its low cost Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) to the small-medium business (SMB) and developer market. The latest product offering is designed for businesses to quickly and efficiently deploy state-of-the-art chat solutions across their web and social media properties.  MyCyberTwin’s IVAs offer SMBs the ability to answer customer questions instantly and accurately, decrease staff costs, increase sales and customer engagement, and find out what customers are really thinking by capturing the analytics of the interaction.

Disney Research and Robotics Institute have developed a method which translates motions of actors into a 3D-face model.

What happens when two chatbots chat? Researchers from
Cornell Creative Machines Lab headed by Professor Hod Lipson at Cornell University have recently submitted this entertaining idea to this year’s Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence. Objective of this competition is to fool 2 or more judges into thinking that a chatbot is a human being.