Chatbots.org Business News

Earlier this year Gartner predicted that by 2015 “50 percent of online customer self-service search activities will be via a virtual assistant for at least 1,500 large enterprises”. Interestingly, one of the main challenges the release cited was not a customer’s willingness to interact with an automated mechanism, but the ability for it to maintain an interesting dialogue.

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.

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.

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!

Online Virtual Assistants are becoming more widespread and consumer appetite for them is growing, as highlighted by an independent survey of 1,500 consumers across Europe.

Results showed that 81% of people said they would be more likely to engage with an online Virtual Assistant if it improved their online experience, 72% welcomed them becoming part of every website and a similar number said they would spend longer on a website that had one.

Virtual assistants can take on multiple roles on a website, such as answering customer questions, performing various helpful tasks and connecting to enterprise systems when needed. Their intelligence allows them to remember facts, learn from their conversations and maintain a two-way dialogue with visitors but what other characteristics should they have?

VirtuOz, the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online customer service, today announced that virtual assistants were a key criterion for determining for CRM Web Customer Service. In addition, the report ranks “new and additional customer access channels” as the number one business case driver for WCS deployments.

Do you dream about conversational virtual assistants that recognize your voice? First try to talk to your search engine. Your voice will be recorded, transcribed subsequently by the speech server, and then sent back as text. With Google Voice Recognition application users can talk to the computer through a microphone and search for results by speaking, as presented on the video below.

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.

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

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.