AI 129 Competition for Talking Avatars Benefits from More Venture Capital Funding

Here are some of the movers and shakers for talking avatars.

Fix8 is a Los Angeles company that animates your expressions, letting you communicate over video live via a personalized avatar. It has just raised $3 million in a first round of venture backing. The funding comes from Vickers Financial Group, a Singapore-based private equity firm. Fix8 had partnered with the Shanghai Media Group to offer something called “AuditionsTV,” where audiences can submit fix8 content for insertion into live or taped programming. Fix8 says it will soon launch a mobile edition.

Gizmoz, an Israel-based company that lets you create 3D avatars, has raised $6.5 million in a second round of venture funding. DoCoMo Capital — a subsidiary of NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest cell phone operator — led the round, which Gizmoz plans to use for expansion in Asia. ngi capital and previous investors Benchmark Capital and Columbia Capital also participated. Gizmoz is also unveiling a new partnership with AOL, which will allow AOL Instant Messaging users to animate their chats with Gizmoz avatars. The company says it has already created animations to illustrate more than 50 trigger words that can be used in a chat, such as “blabla” and “brb”.


Big Stage Entertainment is a new generation digital media company enabling vivid personal projection in online activities. BigStage.com, currently in restricted beta, offers breakthrough technology allowing users to easily create and integrate a life-like 3-D avatar of themselves, called an @ctor, into everything from famous movie scenes, TV shows and video games, to music videos, short video clips, virtual worlds, still images, user-generated content, instant messages, e-mails, social networks and more – instantly. (Refer to AI 56). It has raised $2.9m funding.


Meez, is another site that lets you play around with customized avatars so that you can escape your real world and dabble in fantasy. It was launched by Sean Ryan, who previously ran the music site, Rhapsody. But Meez wants to let you take your avatar wherever you go, including eventually on cell-phones. It is owned by Donnerwood Media, of San Francisco, which has received $4.3 million in venture funding from Battery Ventures, Transcosmos Partners, Allen & Co. and other individual investors.


IMVU, is another company that lets you customize your avatar and go off and chat with people in virtual bars and coffeehouses. Ries, 28, co-founder of IMVU.com, an avatar-creation and instant-messaging service that's lined up more than $8 million in venture funding.


Union Square Ventures invested in Oddcast, which is a leading provider of flash based avatar services to the marketing community and small and medium businesses. Oddcast uses SitePal which is a speaking avatar platform to deploy "virtual employees" on websites that can welcome visitors, guide them around the site and answer questions.The use of SitePal on commercial websites has been controversial because may visitors report finding them annoying. Some research has shown that they can increase sales in comparison to using static photographs.

AI 100: Can you tell the difference between a human agent and an ai agent?

As I have reached AI 100 I thought you may like this test? If you fail the test, please do not read my blog again!!! :-)

The conversations are between Professor Kevin Warwick (KW) and a human; the other between KW and an ai agent. Can you tell which is which?

Conversation one:

Subject: Hello. My name is Nick and I am a human.

KW: Are you happy being a human?

Subject: Yes, I am. Are you? Good. Then we are both happy.

KW: Yes, I am. Are you happy with your life at present?

Subject: Parts of it. I hate my job, but most people do, right?

KW: I'm OK with mine. What is your job?

Subject: I work as an 'online internet advertising monitor', which is fancy language for electronic filing. What do you do?

KW: I interrogate humans and machines.

Subject: Which ones do you prefer, humans or machines?

KW: Which do you prefer?

Subject: Hmm. Depends on for what purpose you mean.

KW: To go to a restaurant, for example?

Subject: Then I would much prefer going with a human.



Conversation two:

Subject: Hello, my name is Mike and I am a man.

KW: Are you happy being a human?

Subject: Judge, I'm a guy.

KW: Does that worry you?

Subject: Don't worry, we'll work everything through.

KW: Do you have worries then?

Subject: Let's move on from that basis.

KW: Why?

Subject: Why? I like this subject.

KW: What is the subject, do you think?

Subject: What is the subject I wonder if I think? I know that it's good to thonk about. Think deeplt about mysterious subjects.

KW: What mysterious subjects?

Subject: Think deeply about mysterious dubjects.

KW: What's a dubject?





Answers:

Conversation one is with a human; conversation two is with the ai agent Ultra Hal (see picture).

AI 57: AI Digital Conversations Starts To Create Real Value in Sales

At long last, Digital Conversations which is the dialogue between humans and computers has started to gain some early credibility in the market.

intellichat, the leader in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) virtual chat technology, is a ray of light for the ecommerce industry: their automated sales agent has helped to save $12 million in lost online sales for their ecommerce clients between April and July, 2008.

In hard numbers, during this four month period, intellichat has converted 160,000 visitors exiting client's websites into customers, resulting in an additional $12 million in revenue from otherwise lost sales.

Currently intellichat is handling an average of 500,000 unique chats per day and 15 million per month. The demand for virtual chat technology is so great that intellichat just recorded over 2.2 million unique visitors to their website in July alone, up from 250,000 in April (graph: http://www.intellichat.com/blog ).

This demonstrates the critical nature of sales conversion and the efficiency and power of the intellichat automated sales agent.

"Sales conversions can make or break a company's month. We have clients ranging from large corporate companies with multiple websites, to work at home individuals; and in this economy any tool that can demonstrably affect sales is invaluable. intellichat is simply the most intelligent, robust and effective automated sales tool available for any company seeking to maximize revenues from its ecommerce initiatives. Our A.I. solution routinely beats non-interactive sales tools and exit retention solutions by tenfold," says Maxwell Clements, Marketing Manager of intellichat.

intellichat also offers several other ‘unique’ features.

These include custom chat windows -- branded to the client; custom browser alert messages -- branded to the client; ability to split test a range of discounts using intellichat personal account managers to find best performers; built in affiliate system and control panel for all users; daily weekly or monthly email stat reports. intellichat's A.I. sales agent is able to interact with a virtually unlimited number of customers at once.

I 32: The future AI will move to conversation but not a 'natural language' solution

Damian Isla an AI expert from Bungie Studios addressed the 2008 Developer Conference and Expo about AI advancements since Halo 3. He described the future direction of AI as the one he is ‘really excited about’ and that is AI conversation. He said it will not be based on natural language as that does not work. The solution is not known to him but may need to be a symbolic language.