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IVA-2010 is an interdisciplinary annual conference and the main forum for presenting research on modeling, developing and evaluating intelligent virtual agents with a focus on communicative abilities and social behavior. The conference encourages a spectrum of presentations from theoretical issues to working applications. Researchers in human-human and human-robot interaction are also welcome to share work relevant to intelligent virtual agents.

Intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) are (in the definition of the organisation) interactive characters that exhibit human-like qualities and communicate with humans or with each other using natural human modalities such as behavior, gesture and speech. IVAs are capable of real-time perception, cognition and action that allow them to participate in a dynamic social environment.

It is being held September 20-22, 2010, in Philadelphia, USA.

Last year I’ve attended the conference in Amsterdam and it was awesome! Truely awesome. You can still expect our report on Chatbots.org, which in a more academic context than we currently present ourselves. The realtime emotion aware parameterized avatar system of Steve DiPaola was a video report of things we’ve experienced in Amsterdam. Furthermore, we’ve attened the IVA GALA 2009 awards and we’ll soon make sure the participants and winners are uploaded to the 2009 page of IVA GALA. It’s all coming up!

2010 will be a great year for the virtual agent/chatbot researchers and businesses!

VirtuOz, the provider of virtual agent solutions, announced today that the company grew rapidly in 2009, posting record sales as a result of accelerated new customer adoption and expanded use of VirtuOz at existing customers in both North America and Europe.

Found on GetAFreeLancer.com: ChatBots – a small research project, job for a freelancer. Write a chatbot based on Elize. Write a report. Earn marks, whatever that may be. More below.

Efficient online self-service is essential for online retailers—particularly since 57% of U.S. online consumers say they are very likely to abandon an online purchase if they cannot find quick answers to their questions, says a new Forrester Research Inc. report.

Virtual agents represent an efficient option to bolster a company’s self-service options, particularly since they reduce customer service operational costs by deflecting agent-assisted costs because they lower the number of customers who call a contact center. Virtual agents—typically with a digitalized human appearance—are software services that provide automated assistance by simulating a two-way conversation in which they can help customers do anything from perform online tasks to locate online information.

Virtual worlds and AI specialists Daden Limited have a global reputation for innovation in virtual worlds such as Second Life and develop virtual world and chatbot/AI solutions for enterprise users, particular in support of education/training, building and data visualisation and collaboration. They are currently recruiting for 4 permanent roles, all based at their offices in Birmingham UK. Details below.

IM specialist IMified, the world’s largest hosted instant messaging application development and deployment platform, has been acquired by IVR specialist Voxeo. Voxeo provides standards-focused Unified Communications and Self-Service platforms.

Previously the construction of believable characters based on artificial intelligence required hand-crafting thousands of sentences - aimed at creating a high-quality chat bot brain. A few creative people took up the challenge and authored some of the best chat bots around today. Until now, the tedious and expensive process of developing and training a high-quality believable chat bot remained a significant hurdle to widespread chat bot adoption.

The new, patent-pending Pandorabots SpellBinderTM technology reduces chat bot creation time enormously. Pandorabots SpellBinder automatically learns from conversational transcripts. Nothing else on the market today can create high-quality and unique chat bot characters as quickly and efficiently as Pandorabots SpellBinder (Synthetic PErsonality Language Learning for Bot Intelligence from Natural Dialog Example Recordings).

Artificial Solutions, the leader company on Customer Service Optimization, announced today the launch of its corporate profiles in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

In a recent issue of Technology Review Magazine published by MIT listed Intelligent Virtual Agents as one of the 10 emerging technologies of 2009. Intelligent virtual agents are able to interact intelligently with users, reduce support costs, encourage self-service and customer loyalty, and serve as a branding tool for the enterprise. They provide a unique, interactive and personal way for users to get answers and assistance on your website, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This press release seems to be sponsored by Botégo.

Alabot an Artificial Intelligence (AI)/ Natural Language Processing (NLP) company based in the UK and India, now has been funded by a Malaysia Based Innovation Fund and also secured a contract with one of the large telcos. The application telcos want is an NLP AI guided chat bot for their ringtones and wallpaper properties.