We have a lot of respect and appreciation for companies who’ve been working on “site agents” (virtual agents) on traditional web sites — Many have been in business for five years or more.  Typically, those site agents are charged with bringing up various data elements or Links, which helps the User to better navigate the site (often because whomever did the original navigation didn’t really anticipate the site scaling up).  The few who are working with video-based “agents” are interesting to watch, though their production quality fall short of where we feel it should evolve (a bit like watching local mattress commercials on television compared to a National ad).

The de facto standard for “site agents” has been to include a rather simple 256 color animated character that lip syncs to the voice (text to speech).  The quality here again is less than stellar.

While surprised it’s taken so long, we are now seeing some of those companies starting to package up their product for “mobile.”

What’s really surprising is that they are porting their exact same product – Delivering links or complex/dense text data — And, including those simplistic animated characters and audio (just on HTML.5 instead of Flash).

Hmmmm?

At contentAI studios, where we’ve been thinking about “mobile user experiences with virtual agents” for over two years, we decided long ago that including animated visual faces and audio was counter-intuitive to the average mobile user experience.  Often, the user is not in a location where they can hear.  Also, they don’t want to have to keep their visual focus on the small screen – they are “scan/viewing” across products, the world around them, a television AND their mobile screen…not singularly focused on one screen.

In that respect, we decided to focus our delivery of interactive narrative accompanied by still images that could “establish” the personality of the engagement, without requiring more than a fraction of a second of User Attention.  And, to deliver short, conversational engagements that are MOTIVATED by our virtual agents, not mere Q&A sessions “driven” by the End User – based on mobile experiences needing to be both contextual andget-to-the-point quickly.

Essentially, our virtual agents have a purpose specific to a Mobile User Experience…with the anticipation of the ENTIRETY of the experience, which extends beyond the screen, to the overall context of the engagement

So, will we include “animated characters with voices” on mobile?

No.  There are other companies who we can recommend for that.

We don’t think most Mobile End Users are seeking a duplication of static web experiences on their mobile devices.  But, perhaps, in some cases, it’s appropriate.  But it’s not what we offer here.  We also don’t believe that the current state of visual animated characters adds value to the User Experience; the lack of technical and visual quality is simply too much of a negative in our opinion.  End Users will “buy into” their chat experiences based on an establishing “still frame,” and they fill in the blanks on their own, without 10 frame per second 256 color “visual bots.”  We know this from our own research and analytics.

Because we never were in the mindset of “static web” virtual characters and have focused exclusively on “small screen” engagement, we aren’t porting over old assets to our mobile platform.  Everything is designed specifically for mobile.  To clarify, we also build for “desktop apps,” which are very similar experiences to mobile apps (small windows on the desktop; typically for extremely portable ultrabooks); but, most of our engagement is on mobile and tablets, based on our analytics.

What’s good for Brands is that they will have choices when it comes to how they approach adding a virtual agent to their mobile user experiences.

Based on price, quality and our exclusive focus on Mobile User Experience, we welcome an opportunity to present our platform in comparison to our competitors.

* Side note:  Yes, we include HTML.5 audio and video on our platform too – But, we use that precious (user) time and real-estate for Brand elements, not for animated characters.