Brand Agents are artificial employees that represent brands in an intelligent and bi-directional engaging conversation. They typically appear in customer service related areas on websites, where they replace the frequently asked questions. However, they now tend to move to home pages of large business 2 consumer brands. Their responsibility is growing. A Brand Agent used to be responsible for about 30% of the questions concerning customer service about recently purchased products, but now some of them are able to answer 95% of the questions. Furthermore, they are no longer only about earlier purchases, but they also provide information about products the consumer has not yet bought. Brand Agents are shifting in their area of expertise! Brand Agents are artificial employees that represent brands in an intelligent and bi-directional engaging conversation. They typically appear in customer service related areas on websites, where they replace the frequently asked questions. However, they now tend to move to home pages of large business 2 consumer brands. Their responsibility is growing. A Brand Agent used to be responsible for about 30% of the questions concerning customer service about recently purchased products, but now some of them are able to answer 95% of the questions. Furthermore, they are no longer only about earlier purchases, but they also provide information about products the consumer has not yet bought. Brand Agents are shifting in their area of expertise!
In the future, brand agents will respond to our gestures, movements in the air, facial expressions, and obviously our voice. And they will respond in a similar manner, whether this is emotional, intelligent or empathic. They will look like human beings, act like human beings and respond like human beings. All research in humanlike conversational AI (Artificial Intelligence) has as goal to achieve this. In a few years from now, Brand Agents will be able to add emotions to the association networks in the minds of consumers. As a result brands will be stronger than ever; just because they communicate with their consumers in a dialogue instead of just sending messages as in a monologue. However, brands still send messages these days, also in so-called ‘social media’, simply because they cannot automate all feedback of their millions of consumers yet. Brand Agents are the possibility for brands to communicate by means of a dialogue.
The great challenge in this area is that all different fields within business or the academic world all use different terminology. It is a mess, to express it somewhat harshly (hey, I am from the Netherlands, that is how we address things here!). The result of this enormous terminology chaos is that information is hard to find about this topic and that this stops innovation.
Chatbots.org, the company I attribute a lot of time to these days facilitates the progress in this field. Furthermore, they have published a massive list with 130 synonyms which contains more or less the same implications. Below I will repeat the 19 most important synonyms . A full list of virtual agent synonyms is available on Chatbots.org.
Virtual human: A 3D animated human being with conversation skills. Although generic, the drawback of ‘virtual human’ is that it still cannot be used for all AI characters. A zoo for example, might want to employ an intelligent virtual ape to act as a host on the website or on site to inform and engage visitors. Furthermore, virtual human is also often used for 3D models of the body: organs, bones and nerves, instead of the social skills of the human being.
Avatars: Although traditionally used for the visual part of animated 3D characters, ‘avatars’ is now also being used to address their behavior, intelligence and language skills. It is being used by corporate buyers of brand agents for call centers especially, even more so in the US market. Being a homonym, i.e. a term with multiple meanings, the movie ‘Avatar’, as well as the deep religious meaning of the term makes the usage controversial.
Conversational agent: Despite being used often in the academic field and being well defined within the community, ‘conversational agent’ is rarely used by businesses and amateurs. This term deserves more attention by businesses.
Chatbot: The oldest term, a contraction of chat and robot; an automated chat system. The term ‘chatbot’ is slightly more informal than conversational agent and is therefore widely adopted by many AI developers, businesses and academics around the world. Due to its informal implications, however, it is also explicitly avoided by a few companies for serious web self-service applications.
Virtual agent: Although widely used by businesses for automated chat services in their customer service pages, ‘virtual agent’ is also used by academics for embodied agents explicitly lacking conversational skills. Neither community respects the meaning of the other, so a compromise between businesses and researchers is not very likely.
Virtual assistant: Although used for deployment of virtual humans in customer service web pages or companies, ‘virtual assistant’ is used far more often to describe someone assisting another person over a distance, such as a personal assistant working from home. Nevertheless, the popularity of using ‘virtual assistant’ as a chatbot synonym is growing.
We’d like to raise attention for the following 7 excellent candidates which could be adopted by the industry.
Artificial Conversational Entity: One of the most precise synonyms ever defined, it is perfectly suitable to address intelligent virtual humans, as well as for other artificial living creatures such as virtual animals and aliens. Also, no other implications of this term are in use. The term is not particularly exciting, though, which might explain why it is still rarely used.
Embodied Conversational Agent: This term describes a visualised body with conversational skills. Etymological analysis on the word ‘agent’ suggests that users might expect the ECA to act upon their requests, instead of simply providing information. Like Artificial Conversational Entity, the term does not roll off the tongue, but it is well defined by academic researchers.
Virtual People: This term is the social variant of ‘virtual human’ and especially useful for dialogues with an immediate social context. For example, it may describe police officers who are being trained in virtual reality, holding a virtual small crime offender on the street, surrounded by virtual people, who are influencing the conversation.
Conversational Avatar: This term speaks for itself and is highly usable in the virtual assistant context. However, the word ‘avatar’ also has a deeply religious meaning, meaning “descent of a Hindu deity”. Also, it is often confused with the Steven Spielberg’s movie. Combined with ‘conversational’, however, and the meaning of the term becomes quite evident.
Virtual Person: This term is pretty straightforward. A few examples are found using a different meaning, such as the holographic projection of a virtual sales person in a store, without any option for interaction, but it is expected that these meanings will merge in the future.
3D Human: Used by graphic designers to indicate a computer generated image seemingly posessing an extra visible dimension, this term is highly descriptive nowadays, but risks becoming outdated in the near future. Furthermore, a 3d human is also often used to model body organs, bones and nerves, which might be confusing.
Brand Agent: A brand agent is defined as an artificial representative acting on behalf a company, product brand, or governmental organization. It is well defined and no other, significant meanings exist, so its popularity is growing.
Amongst the most amusing synonyms are the talkative ones, lacking a strong ability to listen. Their skill is to generate words - and not bother too much about their conversational partner! We’re introducing three examples.
Chatterbox: A contraction of ‘chatter’ and ‘box’, especially known through its use in the Chatterbox Challenge, one of the oldest competitions in the area of conversational AI. While the competition is about creating artificial intelligent listeners, the term itself implies it is only about one way dialogues.
Chatterbot: Combining chatter and robot, where conversational AI should be also about textual comprehension, empathy and emotion, this term is actually akin to advertising: a ‘sending’ specialist. It has been used a lot in the past, but is becoming increasingly outdated in modern discussions.
Talking Head: Animated characters or videoed humans, who start their talking upon the opening of a webpage. Many consumers, often annoyed, refer to those characters as ‘talking heads’. The usage of this term tends to be very informal, but also quite off putting. Some academic researchers use the same term in a formal sense for their research systems with excellent listening abilities; an interesting contradiction.
The Chatbots.org synonym compilation also contains a few synonyms for which there seems to be some dispute as to whether they are true synonyms or not.
Conversational Interface: Computer screens responding to our gestures in the air, sometimes responding to voice, and soon also responding to emotional facial expressions. Strictly speaking, these are a virtual agent without a body. It is very likely that conversational interfaces will evolve into conversational avatars, with no difference at all beyond divergent histories.
Embodied Conversational Interface Agent: An ECIA is an intelligent chatbot with the ability to talk about documents on screen, or about objects in virtual worlds. This allows the user to point at a couch in virtual shop and say, “I like that one, what’s the price?” Not too far from now, every chat bot will have this kind of skill set, making this term a true synonym.
Intelligent User Interface: Much human computer interaction research is focused on gestures, eye direction and body movements, realising a user’s experience of a virtual human on the other side of the screen, just like the user would experience a real human behind glass. Many IUI research is actually focused on conversational AI, working on the future of intelligent virtual agents.
Futurist Erwin Van Lun, CEO and Founder of Chatbots.org, says of the matter, “The terminology chaos regarding humanlike conversational AI confuses potential clients, puzzles job seekers and is slowing down innovation. It’s time for the industry to take its responsibility and standardize terminology. Chatbots.org is happy to facilitate.”