Chatbots.org Business News

The virtual humans industry is growing very fast, as predicted the futurist Erwin van Lun and independent research companies such as Gartner or CCM Benchmark. Nevertheless, many advanced research projects, 3D human design methods or modeling techniques are not commonly known. Therefore, we would like to present three extraordinary state of the art examples of humanlike conversational artificial intelligence. They are expected to be adopted soon by the virtual humans industry.

Independent analyst firm CCM Benchmark predicts that virtual agent implementations will be an industry standard in 3 to 5 years, a critical component in customer services and even the main point of contact in 2014.

The firm surveyed 57 global ecommerce leaders in Q1 2011 on their plans for deploying virtual agents as part of their customer service strategy. This group predicts a 100% increase in virtual agents in 2011, with that number skyrocketing to 400% by 2014. Virtual agents are services such as an automated, intelligent, virtual human on a website, assisting consumers during purchases or for customer service in natural language, therefore also often referred as virtual assistants.

In addition to the growth predictions, the majority of respondents cited use of the virtual agent for “right channeling” purposes as the most promising emerging application. Integration of the AI avatars with live chat (66%) and use of the virtual assistant as the point of first contact for all online customer interactions (56%) gained the most interest.
This study meets findings from VirtuOz 2011 user conference, at which 75% of respondents agreed that virtual agents will be used as the first point of contact for online sales and service by 2014.

Additional value drivers highlighted in the study include:

• 67% note eDeflection from higher cost customer service channels as a key benefit of VAs.
• 51% believe that VAs will increase their “customer requests” handling capacity.
• 36% believe virtual agents will provide insight into user trends to determine and optimize new service issues as they arise.
• 33% believe that VAs will address search limitations.

“Ecommerce vendors serve on-line savvy consumers who are demanding more sophisticated self-service tools that offer a richer and more satisfying customer experience,” said Steve Adams, CEO and president of VirtuOz, a US/European provider of virtual agents for online customer service.

Chatbots.org also noted a steep rise of interest in the application of virtual assistants in customer services. The website lists all implementations of virtual humans across the world in three main categories: customer services, e-learning and gaming. The application in the customer service area is growing fast; in 2010, 95% of registered implementations were related to customer service and e-commerce.

The scores are all in and the decision of the winner is an unanimous one. The winner of the 2011 Chatterbox Challenge is:
 
Bildgesmythe by Patti Roberts

Second Place goes to Mitsuku by Stephen Worswick.
Third Place goes to Skynet AI by Ken Hurtubise

What is the perfect term for those seemingly intelligent ‘things’, which are popping up everywhere, and which feel more ‘natural’ as time goes by?

Well, we have found 161 synonyms (161!!! No typo!!).

As the leading business and research community in humanlike conversational artificial intelligence, we hope to increase understanding of this field, to provoke discussion and to initiate discussion on standardization of this huge list of different terms, some of them with slightly different implications but mostly genuine synonyms.

We are introducing the most popular, excellent candidate terms to be adopted by the industry and those synonyms which are really eye catching or controversial, and we will just list the remaining synonyms.

Analyst Firm Gartner predicts that “by year-end 2013, at least 15 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will use a virtual assistant to serve up Web self-service content to enhance their CRM offerings and service delivery”. Chatbots.org agrees with the upcoming industry growth, especially since it matches their earlier market estimates for 2015 defined back in 2004, but has some criticism as well, especially on the vendor criteria and lack of identifying challenges within the industry.

InteliWISE, a leading provider of Virtual Agent solutions for customer support and e-commerce sales support, announces its launch of an intelligent Tab Widget with its virtual chat agent.

Online shoppers are easily overwhelmed by the large number of products, arcane technical specifications, and conflicting reviews. This is especially true for people buying a new computer. A New York-based startup SalesClark LLC wants to reduce shoppers’ information overload during this holiday season by employing a virtual shopping assistant.

SalesClark is a virtual assistant that chats with online shoppers in order to quickly find the best and cheapest fit for their needs. At www.salesclark.com, you can describe in plain English what you are looking for. For example, you can type “I need a small laptop good for traveling, writing, and checking e-mails.”

Aetna announced the availability of an online assistant to help members who have questions about how to navigate Aetna’s secure member website. “Ann,” Aetna’s personalized, virtual assistant, offers 24-hour support for members who are new to the website or need help logging in. Members receive the same responsive service from Ann that they receive when calling customer service, but without leaving the website. Ann is interactive and easily interprets members’ questions, helping them with the registration process or with recovering forgotten user names or passwords.

Do you ever ask yourself if you are going to need an umbrella today? Or: ‘Where can I get a green tea latte’? Or: ‘What’s up this weekend’? With a new free iPhone 3GS app Siri, you simply ask these questions by talking to your phone. Your question will be interpreted and displayed and suggestions will follow immediately. Very, very cool.

And when you feel like travelling this weekend, you can just continue your questions after ‘what’s up this weekend?’ by asking: ‘How about San Francisco?’, as if you would speak to a real person. Sire will recognize that you’re still interested in something to do for the weekend as it’s context sensitive.

Awesome! Also check out review below the fold showing more examples of how you can use

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.”