Chatbots.org Business News

It’s just over two week since we finished at Mobile World Congress and I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on the conversations I had with people that dropped by for a chat at our two exhibition stands – one located in the main section of Hall 2, the other in App Planet. There was certainly a healthy level of interest in how virtual assistants can be used on mobile devices – maybe this shouldn’t be such a surprise following Apple’s launch of Siri but it was really encouraging that so many people are recognizing the opportunity of using NLI as the basis of a new and effective speech enabled interface for mobile devices.

In a recent release Gartner predicted its top ten disruptive technologies for 2012. Amongst the expected and rather predictable media tablets, app stores and cloud computing, Gartner says that icons, menus and pointers will be replaced by mobile-centric interfaces such as gesture, voice and search. But voice isn’t everything. For it to be a successful method of interaction, voice needs an underlying intelligence.

The goal of psychology is to predict and control behavior. It is the same goal we have as knowledge engineers. This may sound somewhat Orwellian, but it is not about sinister machinations. In Artificial Solutions, we want to do everything possible to help users of our Teneo virtual assistants (VAs) quickly and conveniently find the way to the information they need. Since a VA is typically designed to answer a specific set of queries, we have a clear idea of which content should be covered. For example, it’s reasonable to expect that a VA on a bank’s website will be asked questions about banking, hence it will need to be an expert on transactions such as opening accounts and transferring money, but it is not reasonable to expect it to advise you which sofa to buy with the check you write. Anna knows every item that IKEA sells, but will be puzzled if you try to borrow money from her.

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?

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.