Chatbots.org Business News

Creative Virtual, a leader in self-service customer experience management solutions for global enterprises, announced recently that its V-Person and V-Portal products were positively reviewed by the Patricia Seybold Group as go-to solutions for enterprises looking to improve customer satisfaction and secure brand loyalty.

Specifically, the report cites Creative Virtual’s recently launched V-Portal knowledge management system as its most significant strength and differentiator in the industry.

On November 1, 2011 I gave a talk to Google on natural language processing, including chatbot technology and issues in understanding simple English sentences for a story-game demo which tries to act out the sentences. Download the PDF or read full text below.

Fresh Perspectives

I am an AI research engineer. I want to create things that people use, but that stretch the boundaries of the possible. Whatever I work on, I research it and then try to come at it with a fresh perspective. A fresh perspective is something Google and I have in common, though we approach things from opposite directions. Typically my fresh perspectives involve understanding a domain and then writing a new application-specific scripting language to encapsulate insights I have gleaned. Google’s perspectives come from access to massive amounts of data and hardware.

I research everything. I even researched how to give this talk. I thought about making a lot of clever PowerPoint slides. Then I read up on using and abusing PowerPoint. I abandoned that plan.

First IBM’s Watson beat Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Then Apple captivated mobile consumers with the iPhone 4S, which included an enhanced version of Siri, the voice-driven assistant born at Menlo Park, CA-based SRI International. Suddenly, the idea that computers might be just as good as humans at carrying out certain types of requests seemed a lot less far-fetched.

For companies trying to win corporate and consumer adoption of their own NLP technologies, this is a long-awaited moment. And one of the firms that thinks 2012 could be the year this market really takes off is VirtuOz VirtuOz, Inc., a Paris-born company that moved its headquarters to Emeryville, CA, in 2009.

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

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.