Aim Chat Bots

Daden creates Chatbot Business Case Calculator

Birmingham, U.K. – 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.

“We developed the calculator to let businesses rapidly see what the costs would be for a chatbot within their business, and what the potential savings would be by diverting calls that would otherwise be handled by the contact centre – whether as voice calls or live chat,”  said David Burden, Daden’s managing director.

The chatbot business case calculator allows users to enter a number of different parameters about their business and the chatbot, from the number of staff currently handling enquires and the number of FAQ’s to be handled, to the amount of authoring and testing the client wishes to undertake themselves. The calculator also captures the level of integration needed into back-end systems, so that the chatbot can provide answers from existing sources such as RSS feeds, web services or corporate applications and databases.

David ends “With organisations such as CCM Benchmark predicting that “virtual agent implementations will be a critical component in customer services and even the main point of contact in 2014″ our aim is to help companies use virtual agents to improve their services and reduce their costs. We believe that the chatbot business calculator will help companies to quickly work out not only the typical costs involved in a chatbot project but also see the potential savings that can result within their organisation.

Chatbots org reveals the state of the art in virtual humans ...

Chatbots.org, the leading business and research community in humanlike conversational AI, distinguishes 3 excellent examples among recent researches in virtual humans with artificial intelligence.

Humanlike artificial intelligence is continually developing, and independent research companies, such as Gartner and CCM Benchmark, have predicted a steep rise in adoption of virtual human applications in call centers, as well as application of virtual humans in gaming and e-learning is growing very fast. The industry hides a secret, however, and can be proud of many advanced research projects, design methods and 3D human modeling techniques, yet not commonly known. The curtain on new discoveries has now been lifted by Chatbots.org, now revealing three inspiring, state of the art examples of virtual humans which are expected to be adopted by the industry in the near future.

The first research example concerns a multimodal interactive dialogue system, built within the European project SEMAINE lead by Queen's University Belfast and its partners. The first state of the art video shows a virtual person , Spike, having a spoken dialogue with Sabine, a researcher. They are having a conversation about the world, attitudes towards life and approaches to reality. During the conversation, virtual Spike listens to its partner in conversation and adapts its own behavior accordingly. Thanks to its social capabilities, Spike interprets Sabine's emotions and shows its own emotional state. The confrontational behavior that Spike exhibits presents the use of various strategies of leading an affective conversation. The video is available on Chatbots.org.

The second achievement in virtual human technology makes use of conversational 3D humans applied to the psychiatric medical field. The researchers from Institute for Creative Technologies at University of Southern California created a virtual reality environment, i.e. a real room with projections on all walls, to conduct trainings with virtual patients that converse, understand, and exhibit emotions. They aim to portray a patient with a clinical or physical condition and teach medicine students interpersonal skills. This video presents a 3D virtual human that speaks and expresses emotions during an interview with a mental health clinician. Chatbots.org believes that 3D humans have much larger potential of applications, almost unlimited, and virtual patients constitute just the beginning of virtual assistants’ work. The video is also available on Chatbots.org.

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