Chatbots.org Business News

If Graham Bell had journeyed into the future he would probably be amazed to see how his invention, the telephone, has entirely changed the way people communicate with each other and with their phones. No longer is the phone merely an object that enables you to talk to someone who is not in the same place as you, the phone itself has now become a personal assistant, someone you can give orders to and who will talk back to you. How did all that become possible?

VirtuOz, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online marketing, sales, and support, today announced the company has been selected as a winner of the Best in Biz Awards, taking gold in the Best New Service of the Year category.  Hundreds of entries were received in this year’s awards program from an impressive array of public and private companies across multiple industries, sectors and regions.  The winning companies represent the best in American business.

A novel technique of achieving multilingual (including regionals) speech recognition by combining existing single language recognizers has a promise of

• Increased modularity and flexibility- additional languages can be added or removed without requiring major reconfiguration
• Less complex multilingual implementation – faster time to market
• Enable multi-language speech recognition with a smaller memory footprint – less cost
• Faster execution times than alternative technologies – better user experience
• Easier implementation
• Lower overall system costs
• Lower on-going support costs

Jeopardy! competition is a popular US quiz show featuring trivia in various topics (history, literature, the arts, pop culture, science, sports, geography, wordplay, etc.), broadcasted since 1964. The show has a unique answer-and-question format in which contestants are presented with clues in the form of answers, and they must phrase their responses in form of a question.

From 14-16 February 2011 the first ever man vs. machine Jeopardy competition will be held. Human competitors will fight against Watson, a supercomputer that extracts knowledge from enormous amounts of data at a much faster rate than human beings or any other computer system is capable of.

An online game promoting the new movie Sherlock Holmes is offering players a new sort of gaming experience. The aim is to interview suspects - as Dr Watson or Holmes - to solve a robbery at the British Museum. Thanks to novel conversational “chatbots” embedded in the game, players can use natural language in their typed interrogations.

Other games have used natural language interactions before, says Rollo Carpenter, founder of Existor, the company behind the game, but these only use keywords to try to recognise what players are saying, he claims. “My script technology works by making predictions about what people will say,” he says. It then uses statistical analysis and fuzzy logic to try to find the best match for what was said against this vast number of predictions, before supplying the appropriate response.

The future of chatbots is just starting to unfold. Numerous applications are developed and one of Chatbots.org objectives is to find and test new chatbots and their capabilities.
For example, I have tested every chatbot compatible to America Online’s Instant Messenger which are displayed at AIM’s online gallery.

BotGenes created the BG200K “Spanish NLP Brain”, capable to handle more than 200.000 Spanish expressions including regionalisms, common typos, orthographical and grammatical mistakes.