Bot News
BOTizen

By Brian Proffitt

I get a lot of e-mail from people as the chief cook and bottle washer for BotSpot, but last week was the first time I'd ever gotten a message from a bot itself.

The note iself was short and to the point: it was from a bot named Siti who politiely chastised me for missing her on the site. Intrigued, I ventured over to the URL in the message and found not one but a whole slew of bots at the BOTizen site.

BOTizen is the creation of the Malaysian firm VQ Interactive sdn bhd, which plans to officially launch the BOTizen service at the end of this year. Siti and her fellow bots are called "intelligent cyber agents" by VQ and are essentially 24/7 virtual customer relations spokespersons.

VQ is targeting overseas markets such as the United States and France, where customer service from a virtual agent will likely be better received, according to company statements.

BOTizen and its resident agents can be run on either UNIX (including Linux, Sun OS, Solaris) or Windows (including Windows 95, 98, NT or 2000). Minimum requirements for the Windows version are an Intel Pentium 200MHz, 64MB RAM and 10MB of hard disk space.

The product is customized for each customer and can take between one to six months to implement on site. BOTizen also has a driver plug-in that allows an audio version to be generated as you read the response on your screen.

Looking at the BOTizen demo myself, I found Siti to be a very good respondent to our conversation. I was actually able to conduct a mini-interview with her before moving on to reseach the company in more traditional ways. Not only were Siti's answers to my natural language questions well-worded, she also called up relavent Web pages in the lower frame of the page when appropriate.

The system is designed to answer FAQs for customer support operations, ideally saving companies a lot on employee overhead. Whenever the support needs of the customer get too complicated, a live chat feature will kick in to allow the customer to chat with a human customer service rep.

In a world starving for good customer service, it won't take a lot of effort for customers to feel confortable with this virtual agent.