NASA Uses AI Customer Service Robot In Second Life

Linguo writes "Fusing human psychology with an advanced artificial intelligence engine, MyCyberTwin's virtual humans are being used by organizations like NASA and National Australia Bank to improve their customer support levels. MyCyberTwin technology is designed to allow almost anyone to build a virtual, artificial human — called a CyberTwin — which can handle such tasks as personalized customer support, client sales or even entertainment and companionship. CyberTwins can take the form of a clone of yourself, or a representative of your company, and they can live in almost any digital environment, including Web sites, virtual worlds, blogs, social network pages and mobile phones."

That could be useful in Second Life

[Minwee]

"Hey, it looks like you are trying to create an army of flying penises! Would you like some help?"

Re:

[Baloo Uriza]

"Hey, it looks like you are trying to create an army of flying penises! Would you like some help?"

I guess if all you want to do in SL is be unoriginal, unfunny, and b&, then yeah, sure, your suggestion would be useful.

Stepford Wives

[Canazza]

Stepford Wives anyone?

Can I program a Cybertwin to...

[Monkeedude1212]

Troll /.?

Re:

[Yvanhoe]

You can even program A.L.I.C.E to do that...

really?

[Sir_Lewk]

People still care about second life? Amazing.

Re:

[rodrigoandrade]

I do. It and The Sims (and Spore, to some extent) were the most hyped games ever, which ultimately failed to deliver. Let's not forget the mistakes that were made there. At least casual gamers enjoyed Sims.

Re:

[HTH NE1]

Let's not forget the mistakes that were made there.

Did you not mean There [wikipedia.org]?

Re:

[LethargicParasite]

Everytime someone declares Secondlife dead, it stayes alive 5 more years.

Uh, non-stacking, I hope.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[kalirion]

Why not just become Amish? They don't go for any of that technology crap stealing hard-working people's jobs either.

Re:

[orngjce223]

MyCyberTwin, Second Life and their creators will make money now, but everyone else loses.

FTFY.

Seriously, though, MyCyberTwin is a business enterprise. I know, because I cruised past their website a while ago.

I for one welcome myself...

[Anonymous Coward]

as my new CyberTwin overlord.

Re:

[The Archon V2.0]

Does that mean you are the overlord of your CyberTwin or that the CyberTwin is the overlord?

Maybe it depends who feels like overlording at any given time. In other words, maybe he's a switch.:)

Slashvertisement

[Anonymous Coward]

How about linking to something which doesn't sound like a press release? ...and this sounds more like Eliza [wikipedia.org] than AI.

Re:Slashvertisement

[JWSmythe]

    Well, if you went to their web site, you'd find that it's another absolutely stupid scripted assistance program, that uses keywords to return specific answers. {sigh}

    Yup, a press release that snuck in as a tech story. Slashdot used to be so much better than this.

Re:

[JWSmythe]

    I went to their site, and followed the intro text as a line of conversation. The first answer was vague, and it couldn't give me any intelligent answers after that. Since it was a demo, and didn't have a clear business application, I didn't know what questions I should ask to get a real response back.

    The best it did was told me to log in, so I could create my own bot, and start programming it with what to say today. (oohh, wow.)

Why Hardware?

[Mork29]

This story is in the hardware category, and I'm trying to understand why.... Even if the company is deploying the "cyber-twins" in a hardware solution, it's the software that's innovative here.

Re:

[brkello]

The software doesn't even sound innovative. Do we have a section for that? Idle maybe?

Does anyone actually play it?

[Kebis]

I am always amazed at how often Second Life is mentioned in various news articles and web sites (and an episode of The Office), because I still have yet to find one person I know who actually plays it or has ever even tried it. Maybe Second Life is really big in the CNN breakroom or something.

Re:

[nevermore94]

I played it for several years, made over a grand in real money profit, and had a lot of fun doing it, but now I have a real life fiancee and a little daughter, so I have pretty much quit playing due to lack of free time, but I still miss the fun I had playing and creating things there sometimes.

Robot abuse

[Gizzmonic]

A big part of the realism of CyberTwins is their ability to provide realistic, intelligent responses to human queries. If for example, a customer is using aggressive language or is abusing a CyberTwin, it can detect this and push back, like a real person.

Show me my account balance, robot slave!

I still say this is a Killer App

[serutan]

For years I've been saying that when video phones get into widespread use someone smarter than me will create software that filters your image in real time to look like a spiffed up version of yourself, or any avatar you want. The avatar would faithfully reproduce your expressions and mouth movements as you talk. You could even enhance your voice if you wanted to. Lots of people wouldn't want to use a video phone because they would have to worry about how they look all the time. Realistic, realtime avatars

Just narrow AI

[Quackers_McDuck]

When I saw this headline I was hoping it was about using virtual worlds to train an artificial general intelligence, like Ben Goertzel is focusing on with his "novamente" project http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=memelist.html?m=3%23710 [kurzweilai.net]. So far he's only implemented virtual dogs (well, he's done a lot more than that, but only really experiemented a lot with dogs, I think), but parrots are next up I believe.

Julia!

[Khelder]

Julia, Julia, she's our guide,

She directs us far and wide.

If you're lost and can't find your way,

Julia's here to save the day!

- Julia [wikipedia.org], Islandia [linnaean.org]'s robotic tour guide (c. 1990)