Media Outsourcing customer service to chat bots BY DAEDALUS HOWELL T hat a large portion of oneâ€™s customer service calls are outsourced to India or other exotic locales is old news. Weâ€™ve all been patched through to a phone bank half a planet away to speak with someone trained to suppress their native accent and make references to your local weather and high school sports rivalries. Companies like MyCyberTwin, however, are anticipating yet another shift in customer-service outsourcing, one that wonâ€™t require a legion of nighthawks in Manila. Thanks to advances in artiďŹ cial intelligence, avatars (or â€œvirtual agents,â€? to use industry parlance) can answer complex questions using rational, logical thinking. Think â€œSpock in a Box.â€? â€œBy combining sophisticated â€˜brainâ€™ technology with state-ofthe-art animation, MyCyberTwin brings a distinct and advanced virtual specialty to businesses,â€? explains CEO Liesl Capper. The secret sauce behind â€œbrainâ€? technology is the virtual agentsâ€™ ability to learn as they go, â€œallowing them to consistently get smarter and function at a higher level as time moves on,â€? Capper adds. (NASA has recently implemented the technology, suggesting a real-life HAL might not be far behind.) Chat bots have existed in various forms since the midâ€™60s. MITâ€™s Joseph Weizenbaum is credited with creating one of the ďŹ rst, ELIZA, a program that used a primitive form of natural language processing to simulate a real conversation with its interlocutor via textbased exchanges. Thousands of so-called â€œchatterbotsâ€? have spawned since with customerservice implementations facilitating millions of monthly â€œconversationsâ€? (San Franciscoâ€“ based VirtuOz claims 12 million such interactions a month for clients in the Fortune 1000). But can a virtual agent pass the Turing test? Developed in 1950 by researcher Alan Turing, the test uses natural language conversation with a human as its principle gauge. Though the test has been criticized for conďŹ‚ating rhetorical manipulation with cognition, it remains something of a gold standard if only for proving the fallibility of an artiďŹ cial intelligenceâ€™s human interlocutor. The goal of companies like MyCyberTwin isnâ€™t to fool people into thinking their product is human, but to improve the customer experience by interfacing with them in a manner theyâ€™re most accustomed to. As Esurance proclaims in its current ad campaign, â€œPeople when you want them, technology when you donâ€™t.â€? Ultimately, most consumers would prefer not to have to communicate with customer service at all, be it in Manila or with HAL on some customer-service odyssey. The virtual agent will surely learn this long before the companies who employ itâ€”but then again, they canâ€™t hear you scream in virtual space. Daedalus Howell presses 8 for Technical Support at FMRL.com. Enter for a chance to Win a FREE Home Solar System and save thousands of dollars on electricity! NO PURCHASE NECESSARY-ENDS SEPTEMBER 30, 2011 FE< CL:BP >I8E; GI@Q< N@EEff[j%Zfd EF GLI:?8J< E<:ff[j%Zfd ]fi Zfdgc\k\ [\kX`cj% Official Sponsor Enter now at RealGoods.com or call 888.56.SOLAR NO RTH BAY BO H E M I AN | JULY 6-1 2, 20 1 1 | BOH EMI A N.COM Press â€˜Arghâ€™ 11