Chatbots.org Business News

Don’t you wish your car was as intuitive to use as a smartphone?During the past decade, automotive manufacturers have added more and more electronics to take the hard work out of driving a car. But the proliferation of buttons, screens and lights, while reducing the physical effort required to drive a car, has also increased the risk of distractions.

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.

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?

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

We are soooo excited to reveal our new companies section showing all leading providers in conversational AI, (3D) animation, speech synthesis and speech recognition and visual biometrics, and an additional Vendor Selector tool to select providers, designed for organizations their buying process!

This companies section will also reveal our advanced business members: Industry leaders who have joined our business program, contributed financially and therefore empowered us to move this industry forward. With their support, we have been able to further develop our role as an Industrial Catalyst, advancing the industry of Intelligent Virtual Characters.

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.

At the Computer Human Interaction conference in Atlanta (12/5/2010), Simon the Robot demonstrated he has more capabilities than before. Originally he was only able to move some blocks very slowly, now he is capable of learning household chores without commanding him all over again or having to pre program him with a set of tasks. For example, Simon identifies colourful items: a blue book, a green plastic case, a red flower and several others, and puts them into the corresponding colours bin.

Rollo Carpenter and David Burden have braved BCS’s Machine Intelligence competition in the past. Details now in for this year’s competition:

8th British Computer Society Machine Intelligence Competition

Wednesday December 16th 2009 at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, UK, during the annual SGAI conference AI-2009

Closing Date for Entries: October 1st 2009