virtual agent
The usage of the term ‘virtual agent’ is extremely confusing. Research has shown there are various definitions around. Please find below an attempt to organise these definitions:
The first approach to find a definition is to search on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, there is no Wikipedia entry (yet) but if you type ‘virtual agent’ you’ll get several suggestions like Virtual assistant, Intelligent agent, Robot and Embodied agent. Most of these terminologies are considered to be alternatives for ‘chatbot’. That’s the first approach.
Alternatively, when you enter the term ‘virtual agents’ in search engines like Google, it appears that this term describes people working for call centers on a distance. Thus, for call center agents, (most likely) working from home. Therefore, these people aren’t virtual, but real. However as they aren’t working at an office and still carry out their work, it might feel a little bit virtual. Anyway, it’s a very popular use of this term. Furthermore, the professional chatbot industry tends to use the same term ‘virtual agent’, sometimes it starts with ‘intelligent’, intelligent virtual agents (IVA) or interactive virtual agents for their chatbots. Interesting, however this is today’s practice.
Anyway, don’t forget to check out our page with our list of virtual agent developers worldwide.
Resources using the term virtual agents
- 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
- Definiton on What is ((it says that it is a chatterbot, which is again equal to a chatbot)
Pages on this website using 'virtual agents'
- Chatbots.org 2.6: Forum and even smart account pages
- Intelligent Virtual Agents conference, Philadelphia
- VirtuOz Announces Record Sales in 2009
- Multiuser Intelligent Digital Signage Concept
- Virtual Agents: It's showtime!
- eGain releases assistant 5.0
- 4 Ways how avatar virtual agents can help companies
- Undress Anna (or Adam), Virtual Agents of Polish Postal Service.
- Amélie
- AIM Chatbots: Some NLP please?!
Synonyms for virtual agents
The worldwide community doesn’t yet have consensus on what terminology to use to address chatbots. Synonyms are virtual agents, interactive virtual agents (IVA), brand agents, branded agents, virtual assistants, artificial conversational entities, virtual employees, conversational agents, embodied conversational agents (ECA), chatterbots, conversational systems, chatterbox, virtual chat agents, or chat bots. Additionally lots of local variations on the usage of the terms exist. We strongly believe that the chatbot community should collaborate worldwide to standardize terminology, as that will professionalize the market. Chatbots.org is willing to facilitate this discussion. We’ll use the term ‘chatbot’ on this website.
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Futurist and author, Erwin Van Lun, founder of chatbots.org, is your man!