BotSpot^® Bi-Weekly Newsletter

June 13, 2001

A.I.: Popularizing Bots?

Every few years Hollywood attempts to portray bots as they might appear in the future. This year's speculative film, A.I., comes from Steven Speilberg and opens later this month.

While you're waiting for the film to open, you'll want to check out the movie's Web site, which features information about the movie, background information about bots and their history, and some speculation as to where bots will be in the future.

One point of interest: the Website features a female chatbot that will answer questions and carry on a discussion. While the responses aren't always responsive and certainly wouldn't pass a Turing test -- it didn't believe that my dog died, asking me if I was singing a country-western song -- it is an entertaining introduction to bot technology. Best of all, you can download the chatbot free of charge.

Upcoming Bot Reviews

There has been a slew of activity in the bot world in the last month. In this newsletter, we'll list some of the bots we have scheduled for upcoming review.

BOTBUILDERS BOTS
Botbuilders, which uses the Neuromedia platform for building bots, has implemented two bots in the corporate field: Ciscobot was done for the Cisco Academe as a central resource for CCNA students, while a bot for Track Data, an online brokerage, is part of the trading software.

VIRTUAL STOCK QUOTE HOST
Created by Oddcast, this Virtual Host provides stock quote information when queried. Click on her for some advice. All it requires is Flash. No other plug-in is necessary.

BABY FRED
After nine months, four days and three hours, the world has been presented Baby Fred, a new bot from plan_b media, Cologne, and genie Internet, Munich, a subsidiary of British Telecom. Baby Fred is the interactive web companion in the Internet helping visitors of the genie-site at www.genie.de from now on.

Bot2001 Seminar, June 19, Boston

Want to extend your knowledge of bots and want to get some insight from the experts? Then you'll want to check out Bot2001, a seminar that brings together leading bot and intelligent agent developers, researchers and academics -- all presenting the most recent developments in this rapidly growing field. 

Bot2001 will cover all aspects of bots and intelligent agents allowing the most inexperienced observer to the seasoned professional to have a better understanding of bots as a business tool. Leaders in the field will diffuse the latest hype and give you specific information on how to implement bots and intelligent agents. 

Presented by Expert Marcus P. Zillman, creator of BotSpot.com and CEO of BotTechnology.com, the Bot2001 agenda includes the following presentations:

Bots in Advertising 
Joe Timm, will discuss how to break through the advertising clutter with Bots. Artificial Life mobile computing has developed a suite of bot-based marketing solutions for advertisers. The core of these applications is a branded smart bot character embedded into advertising creative such as a banner (BannerBot T) or an e-mail (BotMail T).

What Artificial Intelligence Can Give To The Web, and What The Web Can Give To Artificial Intelligence
Dr. David G. Stork, Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations, will discuss intelligent software and how it must be trained with large amounts of data, such as speech sounds or common sense facts. In many cases this data cannot be obtained by traditional data mining. 

Enterprise Intelligence 
Mahendra B. Vora, Chairman and CEO of Intelliseek, will discuss how the explosive growth of the Internet has created new opportunities for corporations to become smarter in understanding customer needs, competitive information, and market dynamics. Learn how intelligent agents or bots are transforming the vast information resources on the Internet into actionable intelligence for the Enterprise, enabling them to build better brands and nurture and protect them. 

Virtual Representatives as the First Line of Effective Online Service 
Walter Alden Tackett, Ph.D., Chairman, CEO and Co-founder of NativeMinds, will discuss his firm's self-service interaction management software, designed to build and maintain automated online customer service. 

The Next Step in NLP: From Chatterbots to Automated Communication Centers 
Karl L. von Wendt, CEO, Kiwilogic.com, will discuss the next generation of NLP applications. In the future, they will take a much more central role: As the main, universal user interface that connects customers through various online and mobile media to a company´s information and process control systems. The presentation will show how "automated communication centers" can streamline and improve the whole communication process with customers, from gathering information via order processing to support.

The Client-Side Bot has No Clothes
Jerry Tardif, Vice President, Information Systems & Services, BrightPlanet, will explain why the client-side bot is intrinsicly limited when compared it to its server-side analog. This presentation identifies those limitations and describes the many advantages of the server-side approach. Learn how BrightPlanet is successfully harvesting quality hidden content from hundreds of thousands of databases - offering collaborative information retrieval and across an enterprise (server-based) via a Web browser.

Bots for the Wireless Web 
Daniel Billsus, CTO of AdaptiveInfo.com, will show that the utility of the wireless web has thus far not lived up to users' expectations: slow connections, small screens and poorly designed interfaces often lead to a frustrating user experience. This talk presents novel Bot technology designed to bridge the apparent gap between promise and reality of the Wireless Web. Bots that automatically learn user preferences can greatly simplify access to information anywhere and anytime. 

The seminar will be held on June 19, 2001, at Boston Marriott Copley Place, Boston. For more information, visit the seminar's home page.