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Trying to recognize actionable intelligence from the countless conversations taking place in the social web can be a bit like trying to find a needle in the proverbial haystack, particularly if your customers use multiple languages.

Every day, the social web grows in size and influence with consumers. Facebook and Twitter have millions of users, which means millions of opportunities for companies to promote their products and gauge market trends.

But trying to recognize actionable intelligence from the countless conversations taking place in the social web can be a bit like trying to find a needle in the proverbial haystack, particularly if your customers use multiple languages.

English makes up only about 40 percent of global social media postings, so companies that ignore this language diversity are at greater risk of being caught off-guard by trends or developments that could impact their business.

Now that Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, is well know to the world, users are starting to ask themselves what to do with this technology and what’s the next step.

Traditionally, virtual assistants have typically resided on a company website to help customers find the answers to their queries, but with corporate intranets becoming increasingly complex, more organizations are turning their attention to use VAs to resolve internal queries too. The corporate intranet has changed considerably from the early days of just publishing information. In the last few years as collaboration technologies have taken hold intranets have become a mine of information not just for employee related issues such as human resources, but with knowledge bases such as wikis too. However, having a large resource of data, doesn’t guarantee that a user can find the answer they are looking for.

The robot presented on the video can chat with other humanoid robots via the Internet. Moreover, when faced with a new situation, the robot can search the World Wide Web and gather appropriate information in order to fill an identified knowledge gap. Afterwards, it incorporates new knowledge under its own power, and is ready to execute diverse new tasks.

Present chatbots have rather limited reasoning, inflexible behavior and they lack learning abilities. They perform entrusted tasks in strict accordance with programmed procedures. What if chatbot developers equipped new chatbots with an advanced online-learning mechanism applied recently in intelligent humanoid robots?

Imagine a world where you can talk to almost any electronic device in your household; you give commands to your fridge, your microwave, your car, your mobile and your TV without pressing a single button. Your voice is the sole control of the actions that you want executed by the device in question. It is a hands-free society, ruled by voice and gesture recognition. But aren’t we there already? There’s voice control technology out there that allows making simple requests like ‘call Fred.’ However, there’s one fundamental question about this technology; how intelligent are these human-machine conversations?

Artificial Solutions, the natural language interaction (NLI) specialist that enables users to have a meaningful, humanlike interaction with technology, today launched virtual assistants on any platform, in astonishing short timescales.

Online Virtual AssistantsVirtual Assistants increasingly becoming the first point of contact for users who need help from customer service. However, sometimes it is inevitable that a real customer service agent steps in and deals with the customer query. And here comes the twist; to whom does the service agent turn to when he or she needs help in resolving a question? To a virtual assistant of course!

Every now and then someone writes an article on whether Back to the Future II got its predictions right. Well, judging by the presence of voice activated TVs and remote controls at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year, I think we can add a tick in the box to the TV that you talk to. But as a report by Leo Kelion on the BBC website has pointed out, it is not without its flaws.

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.

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.