Chatbots.org Business News

Companies today are searching for ways to save money while providing optimal customer experiences. As a result, an increasing number of organizations are turning to live chat and virtual assistants.

With such benefits as contact center deflections, increases in agent productivity, and gains in customer satisfaction, chat makes sound fiscal sense while serving as a tool to enhance the customer experience. In fact, a recent Forrester Research study estimated the average ROI for proactive chat is105 percent.

Jeff Brown, executive vice president of sales at Next IT, says that more and more companies are buying in to the concept of chat and virtual assistants after finding that static FAQs and video tutorials aren’t always tailored to customers’ individual questions and needs, thus failing to offer a deeply engaging experience. As a result, the thinking is now, ” ‘How do I extend my brand reach out to where I can engage clients and have a dialogue with them?’” Brown says.

That focus on customer experience is a primary reason companies are now evolving their use of chat from a reactive tool that helps online customers with questions or moves them through the checkout process when they get stuck, to a more proactive approach that entails making customers aware about individually tailored products, services, or discounts when they first land on a site. “People don’t want to just be cross-sold to; they want to be aware of the value-add,” Brown says.

Two companies in very different industries, Aetna and HauteLook, demonstrate that the value of virtual assistants and live chat reaches far beyond helping with navigational issues. They’ve become valuable proactive communication tools to help improve the customer experience.

Virtual agents’  reasoning and actions are tightly connected with their awareness ability helping to relate to the environment during a conversation. Researchers invented the combination of virtual reality and artificial intelligence techniques to simulate living conversational agents being aware of themselves, the virtual world around them, and other virtual beings existing in that environment.

Virtual human Spike has its own beliefs and values. Additionally, it exhibits rude, pessimistic and confrontational behavior. Even a very cheerful person is not able to convince this virtual agent to chill out, relax or assimilate optimistic outlook. Would you like that Spike became your conversational friend?

The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HIT Lab NZ) is developing and commercializing technology that improves human computer interaction and by doing so unlocks the power of human intelligence.

Now, they have been able to add virtual agent Greta, an agent specifically designed for research, to reality. Check it out, this is really cool of how the future will look like!

Researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Relational Agents Group at Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science aim to develop a technology that can address the needs of isolated older adults.

An increasing number of Fortune500 companies have started to use Virtual Agents - Avatars to enhance their customer experience and decrease eCommerce drop rates.

Register NOW for this unique 60min web event - webinar - to learn about Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know Regarding Contemporary, Enterprise Avatars (but did not have the opportunity to ask).

• How are Virtual Agents used by top-tier companies like Comcast?
• How this tech enhances service and eCommerce platforms?
• How much an intelligent Avatar costs?
• Can I have my CEO as a customized Avatar?

Watch Forrester, Comcast and InteliWISE answer these and many more key questions, by attending a complimentary webinar (on May 19, 2010 at 11:00 am PDT, 2:00 pm EDT).

Cassandra is our “Figure of Speech”, a title that nicely represents who and what she is.  ejTalk’s mission from the very beginning has been to focus on the basic elements of conversation instead of developing products to accomplish a singular task.  Most conversational agents today serve a particular purpose.  They talk about specific topics but do not communicate in very conversational ways.

ejTalk takes the opposite approach with Cassandra by laying a foundation for the basic principles of day-to-day speech that will one day allow her to talk about anything.  Take the example of a greeting: There are many ways to introduce oneself to another person.  We may say “hello” to a person we have just met, but to a friend we will say “hey” or “hi.”  It may seem like a trivial distinction, but to the human ear, the effect is highly noticeable.

Cassandra’s entry in the SpeechTEK Europe Avatar Challenge.

eGain Communications has just released Assistant 5.0, a conversational agent that can help Web site visitors search, solve problems and purchase items via typed exchanges in conversational English.

The company says the new virtual agent learns faster and more efficiently than its predecessors, automatically converting existing knowledge—typically in the form of FAQs—into the “cases” in its knowledge base with a claimed success rate of 90%, nearly double the previous rate. The company explains that a case is a set of questions such as “Do you accept credit cards?” “Which credit cards do you take?”, for which there is a unique answer, such as “We accept VISA, MasterCard and American Express.”

A new book gathering the most relevant research on Conversational Agents is going to be published by IGI next year.  We invite you to contribute to this project, and make your work visible to a large community of people.

Chapter proposals of 2-3 pages are expected on or before December 16, 2009 explaining the mission and concerns of your chapter to me, Diana Perez.

Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by January 16, 2010. Full chapters (8,000-10,000 words) are expected to be submitted by April 16, 2010. Once the book is published in November 2010, authors may get a complimentary copy of the e-book and a discount for additional printed copies of the book.