Bots for businesses and more

From...

By Matt Hamblen

(IDG) -- Just when you thought the dawdling economy and high-tech layoffs had knocked all the fun out of IT, along comes a seminar on bot (short for robot) technology and intelligent agents that helped reinvigorate a sense of wonder among attendees.

The Bot 2001 East seminar in Boston Tuesday featured a dozen presentations, some by researchers in artificial intelligence and others by vendors selling software products to businesses to use to jazz up their consumer or business-to-business Web sites.

The term bot also refers to a program that operates as an agent for someone or a business, often to search information or monitor events.

Bots made a splash in 1998, but there have been several quiet years in the bot arena since then. Analysts say the quiet period resulted from the concentration on Y2K fixes and the more recent shakeout of dot-coms.

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But Marcus Zillman, moderator of the Bot 2001 forums, said interest in bots "has been perking up" lately. Part of the reason is that businesses want to find ways to make Web sites more interesting for users, to protect the substantial investments they already have made, and to distinguish their sites from those of competitors. Some will even use bots to replace customer service agents or perform repetitive functions such as answering online questions as a means of saving money, said Zillman, also founder of BotSpot.com in Marco Island, Fla.

Several businesses, for example, are using or are planning to use digital "Stand-Ins" from LifeFX Inc. on their Web sites. LifeFX's Stand-Ins are virtual people that can answer questions or present product demonstrations, said Steve Ardire, senior vice president at Newton, Mass.-based LifeFX.

These virtual people aren't streaming video presentations, but digital images manufactured from digital 2-D photos of real people molded onto moving digital skull models that express several emotions with facial expressions ranging from anger to the wink of an eye.

Sprint Corp., Motorola Inc., Eastman Kodak Co. and Whirlpool Corp. have or will use the stand-ins with machine-created or recorded voices on their Web sites, Ardire said. Kodak is soon to announce an upgrade to LifeFX's Facemail product, which allows a user to send an e-mail with a stand-in based on a digital image of the sender's face. The stand-in reads the e-mail with a machine voice. The user can incorporate six different emotions at appropriate spots in the e-mail, Ardire said. Facemail can be downloaded for free from LifeFX using the face of a male or female model; about 250,000 users have done so.

Zillman said corporate Web sites might prefer a virtual representative, if only to make it easier to update information. With video, for example, an actor would have to be videotaped each time.

Ford Motor Co. and Coca Cola Corp. are using virtual representatives created by NativeMinds Inc. in San Francisco to answer frequently asked questions on their Web sites, NativeMinds officials said.

On the wireless Web, start-up AdaptiveInfo.com in Irvine, Calif., has recently provided wireless users of the Los Angeles Times Web site with personalization features, said Daniel Billsus, the chief technology officer at AdaptiveInfo.com.

With the L.A. Times, wireless users log on for content and their preferences for certain article subjects are constantly noted, and future menus of story choices are adapted to their previous choices, Billsus explained. For example, if a user picks horse-racing stories from the sports page, he will get horse-racing stories pushed to him in the future. But there will always be a sampling of stories about other subjects, such as basketball or other sports, as well.

Users would always be able to find articles that editors deemed extremely important despite being outside of their preferences, Billsus said.

Usage data so far shows that when stories are presented in "adaptive" order based on preferences, there is a 43 percent higher probability that the articles will be read, Billsus said. The L.A. Times system also requires no effort on the part of the users, who are often required by other wireless Web sites to register on a wired connection and list preferences in a long survey, he said.

In another area, Web search engines broadly fall under intelligent agents, and BrightPlanet LLC in Sioux Falls, S.D., described how its Deep Query Manager software will be used to find larger databases on the Web. Jeffery Tardif, BrightPlanet's vice president of information services, estimated there are up to 1.5 billion pages on the "visible" Web, or pages designed for the public to see, with 3 million new pages added every day. But on the "invisible" or "deep" Web, he said, there are perhaps 300,000 databases available to the public, some containing volumes of information that Deep Query Manager will help access.

Gene Riccoboni, a lawyer in Stamford, Conn., with the firm Grimes & Battersby LLP, said he attended the seminar to learn about legal snafus that bots might pose for corporations. At some point, he said, we are sure to see "contract bots" that perform routine contract work that's now done by lawyers based on boilerplate language that can easily be repeated with changes in some variables.

As an example, Riccoboni said a retailer might have its contract bot negotiate product orders from a wholesaler with a wholesaler's contract bot. The bots would negotiate terms on the amount of the product to be supplied and the cost, based on preset terms and trigger points.

While such automation would save companies considerable time and cost, Riccoboni said, an area of concern is how binding the contract bots' decisions will be if a contract bot does something the corporate attorney didn't intend.

Stephen Thaler, president of Imagination Engines Inc., predicted that intelligent agents organized into neural networks will do many things in years to come, including writing software programs, inventing new products and materials, creating natural-sounding language, songs and story headlines and acting as network intrusion detectors. Neural networks involve software modeling based on how biological nerve cells work,Thaler said. His latest research is focused on creating a "World Brain," which he described as a worldwide network of TCP/IP nodes that interact in a free-thinking manner.