Action tendency news

This year’s Loebner Prize winning entry, Do-Much-More, now has its own web site at www.worldsbestchatbot.com

Please visit the site to learn more about the chatbot and to see some of the transrcipts from the Loebner competition in Brighton.

The 19th century Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that ideas inherent in human languages might influence or limit human thought, has spawned a wide range of claims, some little more than urban legend; like the claim that the Inuit have hundreds of words for snow (they don’t, Inuit has a half-dozen words for snow, that’s fewer than English, and there’s no evidence they think differently about snow than we do). In the 1960s researchers began to formulate tests of the hypothesis and learned language was more universal than relative, leading them to largely abandon the hypothesis. In recent years, though, advances in cognitive science have made it possible to spot experimental differences that might have been missed before. So is there any real evidence now that language influences thought? A new Edge article by Lera Boroditsky say yes. Boroditsky researches cognitive science and symbolic systems - thought and language. She claims to have found solid evidence in Pormpuraaw, an Aboriginal community in Australia.

Ford has filed a patent called “Emotive Text-to-Speech System and Method” describing a system that can not only simulate emotion when reading out directions and describing traffic problems, but could also detect the emotion of the operator of the car and interact with them in ways designed to, oh, soothe a little road rage. The avatar is said to “appear to become frustrated” if the driver is a lead-foot, and may say “Your driving is hurting my fuel efficiency.” Or, if a driver is going too fast, the dash-bound assistant could turn blue, ask what’s wrong, and suggest a more direct route to their destination.

Astute Solutions announced today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a Notice of Allowance for the company’s RealDialog patent. The patent covers automated customer service via an intelligent virtual agent that is trained using customer-agent conversations.
Human-assisted support has traditionally provided a higher quality of customer service than machine-assisted support, but it is far more expensive due to labor costs such as high turnover rates, training expenditures and rectifying human errors. To avoid these escalating expenditures, companies are opting to reduce costs by implementing self-service solutions. Self-service, however, can go only so far in rectifying customer issues.

Google has released 24 translatations chatbots for their IM platform Google talk.

If you want to try it for Chinese, just add en2zh@bot.talk.google.com as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Chinese. You can use it as an interpreter in your group chat, or as a pocket translator in your Google Talk client for BlackBerry.

The image shows Sukhdeep Singh experimenting with this bot in Hindi.

Those entering online dating forums risk having more than their hearts stolen. A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums, according to security software firm PC Tools.