Agent's perception of humans news

Every now and then someone writes an article on whether Back to the Future II got its predictions right. Well, judging by the presence of voice activated TVs and remote controls at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year, I think we can add a tick in the box to the TV that you talk to. But as a report by Leo Kelion on the BBC website has pointed out, it is not without its flaws.

The goal of psychology is to predict and control behavior. It is the same goal we have as knowledge engineers. This may sound somewhat Orwellian, but it is not about sinister machinations. In Artificial Solutions, we want to do everything possible to help users of our Teneo virtual assistants (VAs) quickly and conveniently find the way to the information they need. Since a VA is typically designed to answer a specific set of queries, we have a clear idea of which content should be covered. For example, it’s reasonable to expect that a VA on a bank’s website will be asked questions about banking, hence it will need to be an expert on transactions such as opening accounts and transferring money, but it is not reasonable to expect it to advise you which sofa to buy with the check you write. Anna knows every item that IKEA sells, but will be puzzled if you try to borrow money from her.

Artificial Solutions, the natural language interaction specialist that enables users to have a meaningful, humanlike interaction with technology, today announced Teneo Mobile - a platform independent alternative to Apple’s Siri technology and designed to enable organisations to create their own virtual assistant as a mobile app, regardless of platform, mobile device and even language.
Teneo Mobile allows users to interact with their smartphone or tablet using everyday, natural language - either spoken or typed - and provides intelligent, humanlike responses to queries in a user friendly, conversational style.

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.

Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have recently demonstrated that a computer can decode brain signals to infer the intentions of a human thoughts. From now on, people can “talk within their minds” to a computer in order to control it. How the act of human mind reading, usually associated with science-fiction literature, is actually possible?

According to scientists, it is possible that computers understand human emotional state. The algorithm allowing computers to recognize real person’s emotions and feelings will be used in fields such as biomedicine, law enforcement and computer science.

Emma, the virtual librarian, is getting some attention in Northeast Ohio media. This cute article appeared on Jan. 9 in the Mentor, Ohio Patch.

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.