Chatbots.org Business News

What is the perfect term for those seemingly intelligent ‘things’, which are popping up everywhere, and which feel more ‘natural’ as time goes by?

Well, we have found 161 synonyms (161!!! No typo!!).

As the leading business and research community in humanlike conversational artificial intelligence, we hope to increase understanding of this field, to provoke discussion and to initiate discussion on standardization of this huge list of different terms, some of them with slightly different implications but mostly genuine synonyms.

We are introducing the most popular, excellent candidate terms to be adopted by the industry and those synonyms which are really eye catching or controversial, and we will just list the remaining synonyms.

The Polaris Innovation in Technology John Iliff Award honors the life and accomplishments of John Iliff, early adopter and champion of technology in public libraries. This award provides a $1,000 honorarium to a library professional or library that has used technology and innovation as a tool to improve services to public library users. David Newyear, adult information services manager of the Mentor, Ohio Public Library is receiving the award for the creation of Emma, the Catbot, an engaging artificially intelligent cat that engages library users and provides basic reference services.

Mentor Public Library Adult Information Services Manager David Newyear was recently named the 2011 recipient of the Polaris Innovation in Technology John Iliff Award by the Public Library Association (PLA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA).

We have assembled an impressive group of speakers covering a range of topics including chat bot technology, business, legal issues and applications.  The Chatbots 3.x has established a reputation for providing the highest quality presentations among all conferences in our industry.  Come to the Chatbots 3.1 conference to meet the top experts in our community.  Interact, ask questions, and join us for an informative day reviewing the latest developments in chat bot technology.

Intelligent Toys Ltd is the developer of the chatbot called Do-Much-More which won the 2009 Loebner Prize. Our chatbot software is very different from the plethora of AIML bots that have been developed in recent years and employs ideas which, so far as we know, are original.  Please visit us at http://www.worldsbestchatbot.com to see some examples of our chatbot’s conversations at the Loebner event.

We now plan to develop the chatbot further, making extensive enhancements to its capabilities and tailoring it to a particular persona that will be launched as a web avatar in late 2011 or early 2012. The enhanced chatbot will be the first such product to be launched by our subsidiary company which is being set up to capitalize on our chatbot’s capabilities.

We are looking for an experienced programmer to join our small team. The software enhancements will all be specified by our in-house linguistics expert who has been responsible for creating the intelligence currently exhibited by the chatbot. For this reason it is not essential for applicants to have any previous experience of chatbot programming.

Emma, the virtual librarian, is getting some attention in Northeast Ohio media. This cute article appeared on Jan. 9 in the Mentor, Ohio Patch.

Definitions of ‘virtual agent’ within the chatbot industry seem to vary according to developer’s objectives. In interviews between CRM Magazine and three virtual agent companies, the following definitions of virtual agent were identified:

• Mark Gaydos, vice president of worldwide marketing at VirtuOz: The ability to interact with a customer and, in a sense, understand what the customer wants to do and guide them to an answer to their question.
• David Lloyd, CEO of IntelliResponse: It is a way of interacting and delivering customer self-service.
• Ashutosh Roy, chairman and CEO of eGain: A virtual agent is a human-like bot that understands natural language interactions and guides a visitor though a conversational interface using text and/or speech input and output.

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.

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.

Two Ohio libraries are integrating chatbots into their information and reference services. Both bots were featured in a presentation to the Eastern Great Lakes Innovative Users Group on Friday, October 15 in Akron, Ohio.