Conversational Apps on Mobile — Expanding Channels and Reach

May 16, 2011 By

Mobile web is our core and base delivery.

But, we understand that people are using app stores for Search at a level nearly equal to mobile web search.

So, about two months ago, we added Android delivery to the mix.

In the past week, we’ve now tested and are pleased to add Windows/Mobile and MeeGo — and, Barnes and Noble’s NOOK, to our mix of delivery channels; for both Tablets as well as phones. And, we’ve undertaken a fascinating test to delivery our mobile web pages through a mobile chat Client — Not merely the chat, but, the full page experience, including animation and graphics; providing a wide reach to low-level data plan users.

So, where’s iOS in all this? Well, iOS users can always reach us via mobile web. But, we’re also working on a solution specifically for iOS that doesn’t require a full rebuild simply to reach a couple of devices.

More to follow…

Filed Under: AI conversational network, Brands and Mobile, Conversational AI, mLearning, Mobile, mobile marketing, Products, WAP Chat Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Conversational Mobile Apps – Defining Products

April 30, 2011 By

Having been down this path before with developing emerging media technologies, it’s always a terrific moment when the business makes the transition from “defining technology” to “defining applications” to then “defining products.”

contentAI studios have been developing it’s technology for over a year while testing in various applications and seeing market response and adoption — Over the past month, the “product definitions” have become far more clear (at least, the initial product offerings, as there are others which will follow).

- Conversational Mobile Campaigns — Motivated, directed conversational engagement with a purpose:  enter a contest, acquire a contextual mCoupon, engage in an entertaining interactive story. . .i.e. drive the User to take a specific action in an enjoyable exchange.

- Mobile FAQs — This is the economical version of the platform that allows a Brands mobile web site to deliver deep information and graphics without a complex user navigation or dense, unreadable text.

-  Conversational mLearning with emphasis on ESL — Our http://ESLai.com initiative is roaring along; the consumer-facing Beta apps are now accessed in over 100 Countries from both mobile web and Android app stores.  We’re keen to engage in partnership opportunities with ESL curriculum providers, schools and regional mobile content portals.

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What are the future products?

Interactive eBooks with a focus on children’s entertainment and mLearning is high on our list.  And, beyond campaign/marketing apps, we see the platform serving as a complementary story-platform for motion pictures and television — widgetized TV is a space that is fascinating to consider.

Stay tuned.

Filed Under: AI conversation, AI conversational network, Brands and Mobile, Conversational AI, ESL, mLearning, Mobile, mobile marketing, Products, Virtual Agents Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Conversational Mobile FAQ Solution

April 21, 2011 By

Nearly every web site of substance also includes a FAQ page.

FAQs are part of life.

Except on mobile. Why?

Basically, FAQ pages are text-dense. They are extremely useful and heavily trafficked. But, they are really, really dense. On mobile, due to screen size and User’s reading comprehension on mobile, FAQ pages (if created like static online pages) would be nearly unusable.

Solution?

See: http://contentai.com/demos/mobilefaq/

This is the contentAI solution for Mobile FAQ pages — Use conversation.  No navigation required. No dense text to sift through.   Wrapping this up in a widget or accessed via Link in/out of any mobile web site is quick and economical.

App developers and mobile site developers who need to include access to FAQ information are encouraged to contact us for partner relations.

Filed Under: AI conversation, Brands and Mobile, Conversational AI, mobile marketing, Products, Virtual Agents, WAP Chat Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

AdTech 2011…New Products … Uniquely Mobile Experiences

April 17, 2011 By

AdTech 2011 in San Francisco last week offered up a lot to consider with regard to both mobile publishing (our mLearning B2C initiatives) as well as a mobile technology and service provider for marketing, advertising and entertainment applications.

One big take-away was that a number of established, online advertising platforms are only beginning to wrap their heads around mobile – all too frequently, they are not grasping the unique User Experience that mobile requires, as they rush to port old static web solutions to mobile.

That said, there were a few gems in the mix as well as a number of prospective relationships where the contentAI platform is complementary and delivers a uniquely mobile User Experience, adding value to both the Brand and User.

One significant result that emerged from assessing the market during AdTech was the need to scale an economical product specific to delivery of “FAQ” pages on mobile sites and apps.  Please see more on this offering HERE. While we will offer this direct to clients, it is also an offering designed for mobile web and mobile app developers to plug-in to their tool kit.  FAQ pages are a part of our web life; but, on mobile, they are nearly impossible to read and navigate.  While these are not “storied” experiences, the contentAI platform is ideally suited to provide a cost effective solution for mobile sites and apps that need to present FAQ data in an easy to use interface.

Filed Under: AI conversation, AI conversational network, Brands and Mobile, Conversational AI, ESL, Friendly machines, mCoupons, mLearning, Mobile, mobile marketing, QR TAgs, Virtual Agents, WAP Chat Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

MIT, Intelligent Retail and Cereal Boxes…Where’s the Emotional Impact?

April 2, 2011 By

It’s remarkable how many new technology efforts are focused on the cereal aisle.  We’ve posted about the “light up” cereal boxes (from CES) before.

And, as you see, on our site, we use cereal boxes as our leading example of where interactive conversational engagement is a natural.

Today, we were looking at the YouTube video featured here:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/videoblogging/2011/04/02/youtube-retail-aisle-of-the-future-demos-mit-qr-codes-and-intelligent-inductive-ink/

While it’s great to see MIT thinking about cereal boxes, they seem to forget that the cereal boxes (except those on the upper shelves, out of sight of most kids and parents, are supposed to be fun!

It’s time to figure out how to get into the door at Kelloggs and suggest that these characters come to life and start interacting conversationally with us via mobile.   We can provide all of the passive data acquisition too (nutrition information, etc.), but, we can also create fun and memorable conversational experiences.

After all, it’s a cereal box.  It should be fun!

 

Filed Under: AI conversation, AI conversational network, Brands and Mobile, Conversational AI, mCoupons, mobile marketing, QR TAgs, Virtual Agents Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Conversational Mobile Engagement — Think Big. Think Fresh.

March 29, 2011 By

We attended the MobilePortland gathering last night that addressed Mobile as a Platform for Change.

It was an unusual tech event for Portland, in our opinion, because it (a) thought bigger, (b) inspired outside of the box thought, and (c) was global in scope — local events don’t always hit those points.

But, it was also sobering.

For all of the potential of mobile, it also reinforced the notion that most people involved in mobile campaigns or initiatives are sadly lacking imagination.  The “shrink the internet” work that permeates this space was highlighted as delivering consistent failures.  The utopian advertising ideals of entirely rethinking how ad-dollars can truly add value to a brand and the human condition was refreshing…though I suspect it’s a tough road to travel.

There are signs of hope eeking through.  The effort for mobile English learning in Bangladesh that was highlighted by National Geographic here:  http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2011/03/29/english-in-action-mobile-learning-in-bangladesh/ that converges a television show with mobile learning (“transmedia” anyone?) is a terrific read.  For contentAI studios, this article and the efforts in Bangladesh represent the original impetus for creating the platform — Extending television properties to interactive mobile engagement, based on the most intuitive form of mobile interaction:  short, conversational text messages.

Additionally, it ties in with he application of our  platform for mobile English language learning at:  http://ESLai.com

So:

  • 5 Billion Mobile Devices in the World
  • 1 Billion People engaged in some for of ESL learning
  • Advertising dollars shifting to Mobile which could add real value to people’s lives and support the Brand

How to tie this all together?

These are great ingredients, now it’s time to figure out the recipe.

 

 

 

Filed Under: AI conversation, Brands and Mobile, Conversational AI, ESL, mLearning, Mobile, mobile english, mobile marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

What’s in a Name? Just don’t call me a Chatbot.

March 28, 2011 By

We’ve haggled with the issue of “what to call our end product” since our initial launch.  Generally, we use “virtual characters” though we mix up our naming system and add Tags for a variety of terms that are applied to “virtual agents, brand agents, chatbots, etc.”

There was an interesting post today over at:  http://www.chatbots.org/synonyms/

That lists the 130 + (apparently, it’s being added onto in the Comments) names that these conversational machines are called.

It is a problem.  Both in terms of planning Search Optimization, but, also in terms of how a business is perceived.  Particularly, how each differentiate themselves.

contentAI studios and our sister unit ESLai.com most frequently use:  “virtual characters” to describe our products.

Why?

Our conversational mobile “virtual characters” are more akin to interactive film characters than to passive, data acquisition/response “chatbots.”  While we incorporate access to passive data acquisition within each “virtual character’s” knowledge base, 90% of a conversation is driven and motivated by the virtual character.   The “passive data” can either be practical knowledge (i.e. Brand knowledge) or what we refer to as “backstory” character traits.

Each virtual character has it’s own personality, knowledge and mission.

That’s why they don’t like to be called “chatbots,” which, to us, implies more random or generalized conversational functionality.

It’s fascinating that an industry which is quite old at this point (in internet years) has yet to really standardize itself.  It would be great if there was something short and sweet, and neutral, that we could just stick “mobile” in front of.

Filed Under: AI conversation, AI conversational network, Brands and Mobile, Conversational AI, Friendly machines, Virtual Agents Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Conversational Mobile Marketing – Interesting Bits from the Week

March 25, 2011 By

Fascinating week here.  We wrapped  the http://ESLai.com conversational apps into Android with the http://appsgeyser.com online platform.

We’re anxiously awaiting AppsGeyser to tweak their platform so that the apps can be submitted into the new AMAZON Android App Store (whatever it will be called???).  Word is “about 2 weeks.”  In the meantime, the apps are already on the main Android Market, GetJar and a few others.

The news that BLACKBERRY’S tablet will be compatible with Android apps was a fascinating development in terms of some level of standardization emerging.  We hope more OS’s will allow x-platform app access.  We still highly believe in mobile web and a build-once strategy; but, the AppsGeyser solution allows us to leverage our single build but be found in multiple locations.

Finally, we were impressed with the Vid.ly “universal URL” offering to deliver optimized video across all mobile (and desktop) devices and platforms.  Very cool.  It also has an embed feature which is the first we’ve seen for mobile (though we’ve talked about it endlessly).

Filed Under: AI conversation, AI conversational network, Brands and Mobile, mLearning, Mobile, mobile english, mobile marketing, Virtual Agents Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Conversational ESL and Conversational Mobile Marketing – 2 sides, 1 coin

March 15, 2011 By

contentAI studios are pleased to operate the sub-unit, ESLai.com, which is engaged in mobile conversational simulations for ESL students.  Currently, the ESLai.com initiative is in full-swing with it’s initial two applications in circulation as a global consumer-facing products.

Not many web apps will pick up visitors from 30-50 Countries per day in their first week of release.  But, “ESL” content, particularly, due to the high  demand for conversational learning content, attracts Users daily, from the pool of over 1 Billion ESL learners around the World.

The benefits of sharing technology and creative resources between “commercial” (marketing and entertainment) and “mLearning” are enormous.  ESL students by their very nature may not use perfect English – They’re learning! This means that the Natural Language Processing, as well as scripted dialogue skills and techniques must be developed to work with imperfect phrasing.  To some degree, this also helps us with our children’s content, where, again, children are learning the language and may not always input sentences with perfect grammar.

NLP still can’t handle typos very well (unless it’s words over 6 characters long); but, we try to find workarounds for commonly misspelled words.

The work our commercial side has done, in terms of creating more graphically attractive mobile web experiences and improving User Navigation all benefit the mLearning division as well.

We like that kind of cross pollination of ideas and technology.  Everyone wins.

Filed Under: Conversational AI, mLearning, mobile marketing, Virtual Agents, WAP Chat Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Conversational Virtual Agents, Mobile and Visual Avatars…

March 10, 2011 By

Over at Forrester, Diana Clarkson’s blog brought up an interesting topic – What should avatars look like for virtual agents?

http://blogs.forrester.com/diane_clarkson/11-03-09-what_should_a_virtual_agent_look_like

As you can see, or not see, we don’t incorporate visual avatars with our contentAI virtual agents, characters or mLearning applications (See:  ESLai.com)

Why not?  Especially since the Principals of the company come from a deep motion picture and CGI background?

Basically, the technology isn’t good enough right now for real-time, on the fly,  virtual avatars.  Yes, we could pre-render much of them and pull off some fancy tricks to cover text-to-speech realtime adjustments — But, we don’t find this to be satisfying for the end user.  Frequently, the end user doesn’t want to turn up the volume and listen – Nor do they want to watch…when reading allows them to quickly scan/read or look away and return to the content on their own schedule.

As one comment on the Forrester blog mentions, using the dialogue itself to paint the picture for the end user is consistent with our approach.  The end user’s imagination fills in many blanks.  As we review the (anonymous) chat logs and see 10-20 minute sessions, we know the end user is “buying into” the experience without the aid of a cartoonish animation.

Our preference is for incorporating a video, audio or still image within the first step of a chat session to “establish” the experience, then, let the User create their own “vision” from there.  This also personalizes the user experience more than if we provided a simplistic visual.

We did like the follow up COMMENT from Clarkson on the post:

“I think we’ll see a lot of interesting developments in the virtual agent space with mobile in the coming year.”

In our opinion, that’s starting today!  Right here.

 

Filed Under: AI conversation, Conversational AI, Friendly machines, mLearning, Mobile, mobile marketing, Virtual Agents, writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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