Agent's Appearance news

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.

Small Worlds is a fast-growing online virtual world that runs in a browser instead of requiring you to download a graphics-intensive application. Members of Smallworlds create avatars and use these to have shared experiences like chatting, watching videos, playing games, or listening to music.

Pandorabots is a chat bot hosting service. From any browser, you may create and publish your own bots for web pages, instant messenger services, virtual worlds and many other places. Pandorabots utilizes a patented memory management algorithm that scales in number of bots, amount of bot knowledge, and number of conversational interactions. The bots are based on AIML and spring entirely from the work of the A.L.I.C.E. and AIML free software community.

The world’s first sex robot ‘Roxxxy’ by TrueCompanion knows your name, your likes and dislikes, can carry on a discussion and expresses her love to you and be your loving friend. She can talk to you, listen to you and feel your touch.

An online game promoting the new movie Sherlock Holmes is offering players a new sort of gaming experience. The aim is to interview suspects - as Dr Watson or Holmes - to solve a robbery at the British Museum. Thanks to novel conversational “chatbots” embedded in the game, players can use natural language in their typed interrogations.

Other games have used natural language interactions before, says Rollo Carpenter, founder of Existor, the company behind the game, but these only use keywords to try to recognise what players are saying, he claims. “My script technology works by making predictions about what people will say,” he says. It then uses statistical analysis and fuzzy logic to try to find the best match for what was said against this vast number of predictions, before supplying the appropriate response.

Almere is the first Dutch city to have a virtual agent installed on its homepage. Her name is Ally and she will answer any question asked on Almere.nl, giving the site a truly personal touch. The launch of Ally is a result of a successful experiment with the Almere Hyves page (alike to Facebook) and has been officially live on Almere.nl since March.

French software company Visuamobile has come out with a new application Eliza AI, a chatterbot for your iPhone using artificial intelligence software developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in 1966. It was amongst the first AI programs’ and now used as a basis by most computer generated speech programs. You can converse with her on your iPhone as if she was your therapist and like all good therapists, she will answer most questions with another question.

Audi launches holographic virtual assistant named Christa In the Audi Centre in Sydney, Rosebery. She’ll appear life-size to send specific messages. Below the whole press release or click for video.