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Alabot an Artificial Intelligence (AI)/ Natural Language Processing (NLP) company based in the UK and India, now has been funded by a Malaysia Based Innovation Fund and also secured a contract with one of the large telcos. The application telcos want is an NLP AI guided chat bot for their ringtones and wallpaper properties.

Artificial Solutions, the leader company on Customer Service Optimization, announced today the launch of its new and improved website at www.artificial-solutions.com. This new site is the result of a period of analysis, design, programming and collaboration to offer a fresh interface, significantly improved navigation and a better user experience.

The Chatterbox Challenge (CBC) 2009 is an online bot contest held every year since 2001.  This year was different, every bot showed great skills during the contest and the finalists were even closer at score! Jeeney AI managed to pull the “Best Overall Bot in 2009” title.

Project to develop an Open Source Framework to create bots for Second Life

Chatbot site that encourages you to create a virtual you and create historical and fictional characters and chat with them. Virsona’s vision is to create a platform where people can interact with digital personas called Virsonas that draw upon the memories and life experiences of those with whom they have or want to build relationships. Virsona claims to be a social Chatbot platform.

French software company Visuamobile has come out with a new application Eliza AI, a chatterbot for your iPhone using artificial intelligence software developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in 1966. It was amongst the first AI programs’ and now used as a basis by most computer generated speech programs. You can converse with her on your iPhone as if she was your therapist and like all good therapists, she will answer most questions with another question.

Audi launches holographic virtual assistant named Christa In the Audi Centre in Sydney, Rosebery. She’ll appear life-size to send specific messages. Below the whole press release or click for video.

VirtuOz, the provider of intelligent, multilingual virtual support and sales agent solutions, today announced the completion of its Series B round of investment. MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures led the $11.4 million financing. Galileo Partners, which has funded the company since the beginning of its operations, participated in this round, as did Eric Hahn with Inventures Group. The new funds will be used to scale operations and advance product development.

VirtuOz solutions transform the customer support and sales experience online by providing intelligent virtual agents that interact with customers via chat and instant messaging. The agents enable ubiquitous, personal and natural interactions between humans and Internet-based services on a 24/7 basis. The combination of artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies make the agents capable of understanding a complete range of user requests and comments. The agents welcome, guide, assist, and inform customers and are able to reach specific sales objectives by proposing a personalized and direct link when appropriate.

Humans may soon be able to develop long-term relationships with virtual humans that are capable of reading and adapting to our emotions, say French researchers.

Professor Catherine Pelachaud, director of research from the Paris Institute of Technology presented her research this week at a meeting of the ARC Network in Human Communication Science in Sydney.

Pelachaud and colleagues are developing virtual humans, Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), that can act autonomously in a virtual environment. As well as speaking, the agents communicate with facial expressions, head movements, hand gestures and gaze.

They are working on virtual agent that can be taught to detect, via a webcam, the emotion of a person looking at the screen.

Google has released 24 translatations chatbots for their IM platform Google talk.

If you want to try it for Chinese, just add .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Chinese. You can use it as an interpreter in your group chat, or as a pocket translator in your Google Talk client for BlackBerry.

The image shows Sukhdeep Singh experimenting with this bot in Hindi.