I happened upon Cathi’s quote in the WSJ: “What if the system was smart enough to sense you swearing at it and brought on a human immediately?” This functionality is currently available through applications such as AskComcast (www.comcast.net see top right of page) which use sophisticated pattern matching to “understand” when users become frustrated, etc. and escalate them to live chat. Although Colloquis, the company that developed AskComcast, had partnerships with avatar developers, we found that end users were frustrated by the lag between when our application responded (in text) and the time it took for the avatar to “speak” the response. FD: I was a member of Colloquis’s Board of Advisers and prior to that was Director of BD at Colloquis (acquired by MSFT).
I happened upon Cathi’s quote in the WSJ: “What if the system was smart enough to sense you swearing at it and brought on a human immediately?” This functionality is currently available through applications such as AskComcast (www.comcast.net see top right of page) which use sophisticated pattern matching to “understand” when users become frustrated, etc. and escalate them to live chat. Although Colloquis, the company that developed AskComcast, had partnerships with avatar developers, we found that end users were frustrated by the lag between when our application responded (in text) and the time it took for the avatar to “speak” the response. FD: I was a member of Colloquis’s Board of Advisers and prior to that was Director of BD at Colloquis (acquired by MSFT).
by Adam Erlebacher
on January 22, 2007