Agent's perception of humans news

Aetna announced the availability of an online assistant to help members who have questions about how to navigate Aetna’s secure member website. “Ann,” Aetna’s personalized, virtual assistant, offers 24-hour support for members who are new to the website or need help logging in. Members receive the same responsive service from Ann that they receive when calling customer service, but without leaving the website. Ann is interactive and easily interprets members’ questions, helping them with the registration process or with recovering forgotten user names or passwords.

Cassandra is our “Figure of Speech”, a title that nicely represents who and what she is.  ejTalk’s mission from the very beginning has been to focus on the basic elements of conversation instead of developing products to accomplish a singular task.  Most conversational agents today serve a particular purpose.  They talk about specific topics but do not communicate in very conversational ways.

ejTalk takes the opposite approach with Cassandra by laying a foundation for the basic principles of day-to-day speech that will one day allow her to talk about anything.  Take the example of a greeting: There are many ways to introduce oneself to another person.  We may say “hello” to a person we have just met, but to a friend we will say “hey” or “hi.”  It may seem like a trivial distinction, but to the human ear, the effect is highly noticeable.

Cassandra’s entry in the SpeechTEK Europe Avatar Challenge.

This paper is about conversation, or how people talk, and the unit of analysis used to understand the organization of conversation, the turn. It is a product of empirical research and identifies the basic unit of analysis for analyzing and generating natural conversational interaction. It represents a new paradigm, an entirely new way to measure and quantify conversational patterns that are culture, language and gender independent.

It is one of a series of papers that will be published. It is the first paper leading up to the development of Natural Conversational Technology. A long list of potential applications will also be published, such as. how to teach intelligent devices to engage in conversational interaction as a human being or how to do opinion mining from dynamic text.

Download the first paper ‘The Organization of Conversation’

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

eGain Communications has just released Assistant 5.0, a conversational agent that can help Web site visitors search, solve problems and purchase items via typed exchanges in conversational English.

The company says the new virtual agent learns faster and more efficiently than its predecessors, automatically converting existing knowledge—typically in the form of FAQs—into the “cases” in its knowledge base with a claimed success rate of 90%, nearly double the previous rate. The company explains that a case is a set of questions such as “Do you accept credit cards?” “Which credit cards do you take?”, for which there is a unique answer, such as “We accept VISA, MasterCard and American Express.”

Recent research on context-aware computing, such as avatars, has shown many benefits for businesses. According to Virtuoz vice president Mark Gaydos there are 4 ways how avatar virtual agents can help companies (from allbusiness.com)

With James Cameron’s highly anticipated sci-fi movie Avatar opening this weekend, we had to find out if avatars can help businesses in the real world as much as they help humans in fictitious alien worlds.

Unlike the 10-foot tall blue avatars in Cameron’s movie, Web site avatars aren’t science fiction; they’re “real” virtual agents that provide customer service worldwide. These self-service software applications (which can appear as an animation or a picture of a real person) are intelligent, engaging personalities that help Internet customers find solutions faster and more efficiently.

The Michelin Man avatar, for example, not only answers questions about Michelin tires, but can also engage in conversations about how old he is and whether he has a girlfriend.

Ever realized that not only humans are culturally bounded, but virtual agents as well? Practices that are completely accepted in some cultures would totally be rejected by other cultures. Even when they are part of so-called viral campaigns, which tend to be a little bit shocking. However, at Chatbots.org we believe learning starts with openness and sharing. So be prepared!

We’ve stumbled upon Anna and Adam, virtual agents (chatbots or virtual assistants if you prefer) of Polish company Inpost. Both Anna and Adam can be undressed if you know the codes! In fact, for non-Polish speaking people, it would come across as a code; for Polish natives it’s about answering questions about Inpost’s new service called paczkomat. They learn by interacting with Anna or Adam.

In most cultures, this kind of practice would be highly unusual for established brands like InPost. Note that Inpost is not a silly new web startup: They are the first company in Poland offering postal services throughout the country via its own units, represented in 200 cities of Poland via 800 Customer Service Points. Inpost is part of the Integer.pl group which is listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Anna was developed by a large virtual agent developer in Poland named Stanusch Technologies.

Wanna undress Anna or Adam yourself or checkout the video? Click below for the codes.

AIDA is one of the latest intelligent driving virtual agents which aims to change the way we interact with our car and communicates with the driver through a small robot embedded in the dashboard. AIDA is a sociable robot, which reads the driver’s mood from facial coding and through emotion capturing and responds in a socially appropriate and informative way.

Watch video:

Steve Di Paola of the Simon Fraser University demonstrated a virtual agent system to Chatbots.org.  This system interprets real time emotions in input such as voice, and shows facial expressions and gestures.

During the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (related to IVA Gala), Steve showed us how his parameterized facial animation system operates. His goal is to develop a system that can handle any face type, behavior, and voice to be used in games, movies and virtual agent worlds. Their current focus is on how emotions should be expressed.

In the first few minutes of the video, he demonstrated various types of faces. Steve grabbed his microphone and started talking. The avatar spoke similar to Steve and his (or her) lips were synchronized with his words. As soon as Steve raised or changed his voice, the avatar acted correspondingly, which was absolutely amazing. It widened its mouth when talking louder; it moved its eyebrow to emphasize what it was saying, and it responded to a drumming sound. Wow!

More explanation and images after break.

This comprehensive robot control interface relies solely on finger swipes, taps, and presses.

Watch Video: