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Beginning from Friday, 6th May 2011, Warsaw hosts eight edition of a documentary film festival named Planete Doc Film Festival. I participate in it intensively - I bought tickets for 10 movies! On Saturday I have seen the movie: Life 2.0., and I am very impressed by this film and its story. It is about people that live their everyday life into a virtual online world Second Life.

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 155 synonyms (155!!! 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.

The Polaris Innovation in Technology John Iliff Award honors the life and accomplishments of John Iliff, early adopter and champion of technology in public libraries. This award provides a $1,000 honorarium to a library professional or library that has used technology and innovation as a tool to improve services to public library users. David Newyear, adult information services manager of the Mentor, Ohio Public Library is receiving the award for the creation of Emma, the Catbot, an engaging artificially intelligent cat that engages library users and provides basic reference services.

Mentor Public Library Adult Information Services Manager David Newyear was recently named the 2011 recipient of the Polaris Innovation in Technology John Iliff Award by the Public Library Association (PLA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA).

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.

VirtuOz announced that the company processed a record 144 million conversations in 2010 on behalf of its customers, indicating increased adoption of virtual agent solutions by both companies and their users. In addition, the company announced 150 percent growth in the number of global companies headquartered in the US using its virtual agent solutions, complementing its historically strong performance in the EU.

3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART)
Event on 2011-01-28 00:00:00
Conference name: 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART)

Location: Rome, Italy

Event Date: 28 – 30 January, 2011

Preparing you for our research tab . Below you’ll find more information….

Intelligent Toys Ltd is the developer of the chatbot called Do-Much-More which won the 2009 Loebner Prize. Our chatbot software is very different from the plethora of AIML bots that have been developed in recent years and employs ideas which, so far as we know, are original.  Please visit us at www.worldsbestchatbot.com to see some examples of our chatbot’s conversations at the Loebner event.

We now plan to develop the chatbot further, making extensive enhancements to its capabilities and tailoring it to a particular persona that will be launched as a web avatar in late 2011 or early 2012. The enhanced chatbot will be the first such product to be launched by our subsidiary company which is being set up to capitalize on our chatbot’s capabilities.

We are looking for an experienced programmer to join our small team. The software enhancements will all be specified by our in-house linguistics expert who has been responsible for creating the intelligence currently exhibited by the chatbot. For this reason it is not essential for applicants to have any previous experience of chatbot programming.

Kate is a virtual customer-service representative created to help people visiting the AT&T Premier Store. The Premier Store is where AT&T Business Customers and Individual Responsibility Users can manager their accounts and shop online for great deals on the latest wireless devices, plans and accessories.

Definitions of ‘virtual agent’ within the chatbot industry seem to vary according to developer’s objectives. In interviews between CRM Magazine and three virtual agent companies, the following definitions of virtual agent were identified:

• Mark Gaydos, vice president of worldwide marketing at VirtuOz: The ability to interact with a customer and, in a sense, understand what the customer wants to do and guide them to an answer to their question.
• David Lloyd, CEO of IntelliResponse: It is a way of interacting and delivering customer self-service.
• Ashutosh Roy, chairman and CEO of eGain: A virtual agent is a human-like bot that understands natural language interactions and guides a visitor though a conversational interface using text and/or speech input and output.

What would happen when various individual virtual agents cooperate and process data through interdisciplinary systems?

According to an article of David Hunter Tow, Director of the Future Planet Research Centre, interactive virtual agents could end up playing a huge role in saving the planet and its evolution could grow exponentially.