Agent's Processing news

In April 2009 Chatiquette was published in Dutch by Floris van der Veen, founder and CEO of LiveCom. In addition to this book I would like to give some suggestions to companies who are currently using chat and show them the potential functionality of chatbots.
If you decide to use chat as one of your communication tools to interact with your customers, you might like to consider using a chatbot. A chatbot can filter your customer responses and give your customers chat services 24/7.

How creative will intelligent life be? Will computers be creative? Will chatbots be creative? In my opinion, computers will be more intelligent, more creative, and will have more humour than any human in the world. It’s just a matter of time.

The 19th century Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that ideas inherent in human languages might influence or limit human thought, has spawned a wide range of claims, some little more than urban legend; like the claim that the Inuit have hundreds of words for snow (they don’t, Inuit has a half-dozen words for snow, that’s fewer than English, and there’s no evidence they think differently about snow than we do). In the 1960s researchers began to formulate tests of the hypothesis and learned language was more universal than relative, leading them to largely abandon the hypothesis. In recent years, though, advances in cognitive science have made it possible to spot experimental differences that might have been missed before. So is there any real evidence now that language influences thought? A new Edge article by Lera Boroditsky say yes. Boroditsky researches cognitive science and symbolic systems - thought and language. She claims to have found solid evidence in Pormpuraaw, an Aboriginal community in Australia.

We engage in numerous discussions throughout the day, about a variety of topics, from work assignments to the Super Bowl to what we are having for dinner that evening. We effortlessly move from conversation to conversation, probably not thinking twice about our brain’s ability to understand everything that is being said to us. How does the brain turn seemingly random sounds and letters into sentences with clear meaning?

Carnegie Mellon undergraduates Dan Eisenberg, Kevin Li and Ilya Brin have developed the EyeTable, which is described as “an artificially intelligent dinner table that reads physical gestures and speech patterns and lets the participants know how the date is going-in real time.

Ford has filed a patent called “Emotive Text-to-Speech System and Method” describing a system that can not only simulate emotion when reading out directions and describing traffic problems, but could also detect the emotion of the operator of the car and interact with them in ways designed to, oh, soothe a little road rage. The avatar is said to “appear to become frustrated” if the driver is a lead-foot, and may say “Your driving is hurting my fuel efficiency.” Or, if a driver is going too fast, the dash-bound assistant could turn blue, ask what’s wrong, and suggest a more direct route to their destination.

Researchers at Brown University have created a robot that recognizes human gestures such as ‘stop’ and ‘follow’.

Humans may soon be able to develop long-term relationships with virtual humans that are capable of reading and adapting to our emotions, say French researchers.

Professor Catherine Pelachaud, director of research from the Paris Institute of Technology presented her research this week at a meeting of the ARC Network in Human Communication Science in Sydney.

Pelachaud and colleagues are developing virtual humans, Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), that can act autonomously in a virtual environment. As well as speaking, the agents communicate with facial expressions, head movements, hand gestures and gaze.

They are working on virtual agent that can be taught to detect, via a webcam, the emotion of a person looking at the screen.

Astute Solutions announced today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a Notice of Allowance for the company’s RealDialog patent. The patent covers automated customer service via an intelligent virtual agent that is trained using customer-agent conversations.
Human-assisted support has traditionally provided a higher quality of customer service than machine-assisted support, but it is far more expensive due to labor costs such as high turnover rates, training expenditures and rectifying human errors. To avoid these escalating expenditures, companies are opting to reduce costs by implementing self-service solutions. Self-service, however, can go only so far in rectifying customer issues.

Google has released 24 translatations chatbots for their IM platform Google talk.

If you want to try it for Chinese, just add .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Chinese. You can use it as an interpreter in your group chat, or as a pocket translator in your Google Talk client for BlackBerry.

The image shows Sukhdeep Singh experimenting with this bot in Hindi.