The College is a part of the Bharti Vidyapeeth Group which runs over 170 colleges and institutes across India. Amplify Mindware Group of Institutions is the I.T. college within the Bharti Vidyapeeth Group.

I have been interacting with the Chairman and the CEO of the college for the past couple of months and have recently inked a contract to provide interactive virtual avatars to their students.

The College has a dedicated elearning division (http://www.enhanceducation.com/) which is responsible for all initiatives in the learning space. “The vision for EnhanceEducation is to create an additional parallel channel for learner / student to acquire curriculum based studies either for purposes of learning, revision or even last minute exam preparation”

I am glad that there are colleges in India who are  proactive in adopting new technology and methedologies to distribute content. This will bridge the vast divide between people who want to learn and their ability to access quality content.

The first release will be for internal use by the students – it is a web based virtual avatar which uses off the shelf text to speech engines along-with the interactive alabot rule engine. The idea is to make learning fun and get the students to use the content created by the college more frequently and effectively.

There are various research papers which detail the advantages of using embodied agents for elearning.

The case study attached below is by Stanford and I quote:-

“is a brief summary of the role that interactive online characters can play in automated teaching and commerce applications. The paper begins with a brief review of major conclusions from psychological research that has examined human responses to interactive technology. Subsequently, important benefits of interactive character interfaces are reviewed as they apply to online learning and business”

Stanford_University_avatar_case_study.pdf

I hope that this system can bring about an improvement in learning and spreading of education in India.

]]> http://alabot.com/elearning-text-to-speech-and-virtual-avatars/feed/ 1 http://alabot.com/launch-in-malaysia-on-sms/ http://alabot.com/launch-in-malaysia-on-sms/#comments Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:01:24 +0000 Akshat http://alabot.com/?p=725 We are pleased to announce the launch of our Translator Bot in Malaysia with our partner Dream Chorus

The application is on a SMS short-code and will provide instant translation services.

A user can now  send a message to the Alabot Shortcode in English and get a reply in Malay which helps them overcome the language barrier and travel freely within Malaysia.

Click on the image below for the printed version in the local papers, the ad is on the right hand side bottom of the page.

Translator Bot

Alabot

Promote Your Page Too

Pedagogic Conversational Agents (PCAs) can be defined as virtual characters, which can teach or be taught by students in a domain, and even to serve as learner companions to void the so-called isolation problem of computer-based education. PCAs can be animated, and may consist only of a face, or have a full body (embodied conversational agents). Given that the educational application keeps a learner model, the PCA could use this to adapt the information presented to the user. It is therefore expected that the interaction will not only be more natural, but also more efficient, because it will be focused on the needs and preferences of each student.

Call for papers: International Workshop on Adaptation and Personalization in E-B/Learning using Pedagogic Conversational Agents, June 21th, 2010, Hawaii, USA.

General

* Motivation, benefits, and issues of the use of Pedagogic Conversational Agents in EB/Learning
* Techniques and Methods
* Results and Metrics
* Social and Educational Issues

Pedagogic Conversational Agents

* Definition and taxonomy of Pedagogic Conversational Agents
o Learner Companions
o Teachable Agents
o Virtual Tutors
o Question-Answering tutors
o Other
* Educational systems using Pedagogic Conversational Agents
* Case Studies: impact of the use of the Pedagogic Conversational Agents

Adaptation using Conversational Agents in E-B/Learning

* Generated Open Student Models
* Negotiated Student Model with the Pedagogic Conversational Agent
* User Studies and Experiences
* Evaluation

http://www.chatbots.org/conversational/agent/call_for_papers_pedagogic_conversational_agents/

By Jetty van Kooij, January 17 2010 in Business news
Posted in Market, Market research

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 agents help shoppers be more self-reliant online, which many prefer, says the report. 36% of consumers say they strongly prefer to find answers for themselves rather than reach out via telephone or e-mail, while only 28% of consumers prefer to contact companies via a telephone or e-mail rather than finding an answer on the company’s web site, according to the report.

Moreover, virtual agents can also help drive cross-sales by providing personalized product suggestions. For instance, Finaref, a French consumer credit and payment protection insurance company, reported that when its virtual agent is present on its home or product pages, its overall conversion rates jump 1.8% and 2.7%, respectively. And, when customers have a dialog with the virtual agent, they are 15 times more likely to make a purchase.

However, the Forrester survey found that only 8% of consumers say they are interested in using a virtual agent. But that represents a lack of exposure to the technology, rather than a lack of interest, says the report. Indeed, the report predicts that as online retailers offer virtual agents on their sites, the technology will quickly gain favor among shoppers seeking a fast, self-sufficient solution to their concerns.

Forrester conducted the online survey of 4,653 consumers in October.

Who: Botmasters, bot businesses, bot enthusiasts, bot hobbyists, scientists, students, and the press are invited.

What: Chatbots 3.0 Conference

When: Saturday, March 27, 2010 9am-6pm

Where: Suite 3200 (32nd Floor) Liberty Place, 50 S. 16th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102, USA

Why:  Bring together botmasters for a meeting IRL to share ideas and garner some publicity.  The conference is not limited to AIML, but takes a “big tent” approach to invite people working on all bot technologies and companies.  Similar meetings we’ve hosted in San Francisco in 2003 and Guildford, UK in 2005 proved to be a great success.

How much: Free admission.

There is a preliminary conference site up at
http://chatbots3.eventbrite.com/

There are one or two slots open for prospective speakers (Erwin Van Lun is one of the speakers).  Please contact me if you are interested in giving a 30 minute presentation at Chatbots 3.0

Contact:
Dr. Richard Wallace

+1-609-379-2552
Skype: dr.wallace
drwallace@alicebot.org

Why Chatbots 3.0?

Artificial intelligence chat bots, also known as chatterbots or conversational agents, developed in a series of three stages over the past 60 years.

The First Wave

Alan Turing conceived of the talking computer in his 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. For his famous test, Turing imagined an artificial intelligence that communicates in natural language through a text based medium, such as a teletype.

In 1966 MIT Professor Joseph Weizenbaum became the first botmaster, or chat bot author, when he created the famous ELIZA prorgam. ELIZA was the first A.I. to apply the concept of stimulus-response pattern recognition to natural language understanding. ELIZA was also the first bot to employ conversational logging as a means for the botmaster to review and refine the bot.

Dr. Hugh Loebner began sponsoring the first real-world Turing Test in 1991. To the surpise of many, the winner of the first contest was based on the ELIZA psychiatrist program.

In 1994, Michael Mauldin created a bot named Julia in an online MUD environment. He coined the term “chatterbot” to describe his conversational programs.

The Second Wave

The advent of the world web marked the beginning of widespread access to chatterbots. By exposing their bots on the web, botmasters collected a huge amount of conversational log data to help them improve the quality of the bots. Better and faster computers led to the development of large knowledge bases for bots.

Dr. Richard Wallace launched the free software ALICE project in 1995. ALICE led to the development of the open AIML standard for creating chat bots.  An alphabet soup of AIML interpreters and servers appeared.

The first commercial chat bot companies, Neuromedia and Virtual Personalities, were launched in the heady early days of the dot-com boom.

In the late 90’s, two prominent web sites emerged to provide to index and promote chat bot projects and companies. These were the Simon Laven page, and Marcus Zillman’s Botspot.com.

The Third Wave

Today chatterbots have been adapted to nearly every ecological niche on the internet. Bots appear on web pages, in instant messaging, and respond to email and forum posts. They can be found in Second Life, in online games, and in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

New technologies for automated learning have appeared which vastly reduce the time and effort needed to create convincing bots. At the same time, a series of new commercial opportunities have opened for bots and their botmasters.

We’re experiencing the beginning of a new era. The time has come to gather together the leading experts in chat bot technology to share our ideas and discoveries.

Look forward to meet you @Chatbots 3.0!

Erwin Van Lun

CEO, founder Chatbots.org

Advancing the Chatbot Industry WorldWide

Amsterdam, The Netherlands:

+31 621 567 657 (GMT + 1, 24h/day)

Sydney, Australia:

+61 2 8007 4744 (GMT + 10, 24h/day)

W www.chatbots.org

E erwin.van.lun@chatbots.org

Skype: erwinvanlun

Twitter: chatbots

Personal info about futurist and keynote speaker Erwin Van Lun on

www.erwinvanlun.com