Agent's Capabilities news

VirtuOz, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (intelligent virtual agents) for online marketing, sales, and support, today announced that Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content and threat management solutions, has extended the mission of Lena, its VirtuOz IVA, to online sales. By integrating Lena into its online retail operation, Kaspersky Lab can now provide personalized sales assistance to customers 24/7.

Life is much too serious and we all need more laughter in our lives.

Now that we are starting off fresh in the New Year it’s a good time to bring out your best – your sense of humor combined with your love of new technology.

Speech Technology Group cordially invites you to enter our speech humor contest.

Here is how it work’s – it’s easy:

The best submissions received by January 27th will be posted at http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com

The winner will be announced on February 3rd and gets a Kindle Fire.

Are you game?

For a quick sample to get your juices flowing and to sign up, do to http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com/speech-humor

It’s that time of the year again: children writing up their wishlists for the upcoming holidays. Ecreation once again enables kids to chat with their favorite holiday characters: Saint Nicholas who is a local custom on the 5th of December in the Netherlands and Belgium, and Santa Claus who visits most children worldwide during Christmas.

Since today Dutch speaking children can chat again with Saint Nicholas - known locally as Sinterklaas - by adding his address to their Live Messenger. A chatbot that has been programmed to act like the real Saint, responds to children with witty remarks and a sense of humor. Kids can play games with him, listen and sing-a-long to his songs, and even find recipes to make candy which is associated with the popular holiday, celebrated each year on the 5th of December. Boys and girls can even report naughty friends to the Saint! Since his “resurrection” in 2006, over 200,000 people had a chat with Sinterklaas.

Additionally, as Santa Claus will make an appearance again on Live Messenger in December. This chatterbot is speaking English and has a similar range of useful Christmas related functionalities.

“Each year the Sinterklaas and Santa chatbots are a huge success, ” says Sjoerd van Dijk of Ecreation, developer of these chatbots. “It enables children to have a fun time chatting and interacting with their favorite holiday characters, each year they are having a fun time using all the possible activities and functionalities.”

Have you ever dreamed of discussing the history of radioactivity with Marie Curie in person? It became possible. Museums, galleries and science centers plan to engage visitors in their exhibits by bringing intelligent avatars which represent historic figures, contemporary personalities or fictional characters.

Jeopardy! competition is a popular US quiz show featuring trivia in various topics (history, literature, the arts, pop culture, science, sports, geography, wordplay, etc.), broadcasted since 1964. The show has a unique answer-and-question format in which contestants are presented with clues in the form of answers, and they must phrase their responses in form of a question.

From 14-16 February 2011 the first ever man vs. machine Jeopardy competition will be held. Human competitors will fight against Watson, a supercomputer that extracts knowledge from enormous amounts of data at a much faster rate than human beings or any other computer system is capable of.

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.

Online shoppers are easily overwhelmed by the large number of products, arcane technical specifications, and conflicting reviews. This is especially true for people buying a new computer. A New York-based startup SalesClark LLC wants to reduce shoppers’ information overload during this holiday season by employing a virtual shopping assistant.

SalesClark is a virtual assistant that chats with online shoppers in order to quickly find the best and cheapest fit for their needs. At www.salesclark.com, you can describe in plain English what you are looking for. For example, you can type “I need a small laptop good for traveling, writing, and checking e-mails.”

Don’t try to argue about climate change on Twitter…Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW will track you down and will respond to you with links to scientific sources to counter attack your arguments about global warming.

Do you ever ask yourself if you are going to need an umbrella today? Or: ‘Where can I get a green tea latte’? Or: ‘What’s up this weekend’? With a new free iPhone 3GS app Siri, you simply ask these questions by talking to your phone. Your question will be interpreted and displayed and suggestions will follow immediately. Very, very cool.

And when you feel like travelling this weekend, you can just continue your questions after ‘what’s up this weekend?’ by asking: ‘How about San Francisco?’, as if you would speak to a real person. Sire will recognize that you’re still interested in something to do for the weekend as it’s context sensitive.

Awesome! Also check out review below the fold showing more examples of how you can use