Context news

Big Brother has a long history in the movies. One of the better known additions to the genre is “Enemy of the State”, a 1998 thriller directed by Tony Scott. I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen this movie, but it recently resurfaced on TV and the movie continues to entertain. However, fifteen years have taken a toll and the once-futuristic surveillance technology looks commonplace today — when the National Security Agency’s spy satellite zooms down to photograph a building, you immediately think of Google’s Street View.

An innovative business case calculator has been created by technology company Daden Limited to help organisations understand the potential savings that using an interactive virtual agent – or chatbot - can deliver.

Chatbots are computer applications that can act as a first line of support providing instant responses to questions, without the need for staff intervention, reducing pressure on resources. Available 24 hours a day, seven days a week they can also collect information, provide links to pages and answer queries using natural language conversation, whilst allowing human staff to focus on more complex queries.

Research has shown that the average cost-per-contact using a chatbot is under 60p, compared to over £3.50 for live text-chat or over £4 for a telephone contact – almost 84% reduction in costs.  But clients often want to know what the actual benefits and savings would be for their own business.

VirtuOz, the leading provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online customer service, appointed Laurent David as Head of Sales, France to support VirtuOz’ European growth and response to increased demand for intelligent virtual agents. With 22 years of successful sales experience in promoting the adoption of disruptive technologies, Laurent David is responsible for managing VirtuOz’s continued growth in France as well as expanding VirtuOz’ European presence.

Yahoo!, Google and Bing launched revolutionary microdata format that will change the way search engines understand, analyze and categorize your site! Will that make a breakthrough in chatbot industry as well?

The video above presents Schema.org project, explaining its functionality on the basis of the word “avatar”. In fact, it is quite confusing, because the term ‘avatar’  can refer to the famous movie, a digital image representing a human, and also avatar in the form of conversational agent present on a website. Chatbots.org have already identified this term as a part of over 130 chatbots synonyms collection.