We won the "most creative new" reward

We, along with the content provider Es Egitim were honored by "Dogan Yayin Holding" for a bot we recently built for high school students, guiding them on their way to the college.

How we help, who we help

Now that we have a modest amount of followers in the international web community, i'd like to give some information as to what we do, what our intentions are, and what we have accomplished so far, in the first 22 months of our operation.

Our proprietary technology has been developed from scratch. We gained significant know-how on applications what Wikipedia calls "Weak Artificial Intelligence".

How we help

Virtual intelligent agents: These agents interact with users in a human-like way, helping them retrieve information in an informal, quick and easy way. They operate on the web, on instant messaging platforms and mobile devices.

Knowledgebase tools: This product allows any employee, particularly call-center agents, get self-help on the web in a matter of seconds. It replaces conventional knowledgebase systems which are usually intranets in the form of plain HTML pages. Agents now retreive the information up to 66% faster!

Contextual e-mail autoresponders: Although in early production stage, this product is very promissing for companies dealing with large amount of inbound e-mail traffic.

Who we help

In alphabetical order: Avea (Second largest GSM operator of Turkey), Hepsiburada (Largest e-commerce website of Turkey, owned by one of the largest conglomerates of Turkey, The Dogan Group), TEB (a partner of BNP BARIPAS, sixth largest bank in the world, and the largest one in the Euro region), Tefal (Co-operated with Project House), TTNET (Largest operator of DSL and dial-up services in Turkey)

In the press:

Our technology and applications were covered in variety of national newspapers, magazines and TV channels, including the following:

                  

Please refer to our website for more information

An exclusive offer to the readers of this blog.

I realised we have a couple of very loyal returning visitors out there who almost come back each day to check for new updates! Given that this blog has an average 20 visitors a day, i thought it wouldn't be an awful idea to offer you guys an opportunity to exclusively test our new product before the official launch date. So whether you already have a shopping experience with Hepsiburada or not, please go ahead and ask a question or two. (Please note that the bot is not responsible for recognizing product names or brands.) Your feedback would be greatly appreciated. And stay tuned for more exclusive news!

Yet another TV appearance

Courtesy of Melih Bayram Dede, the following interview was aired on TVNET, a national TV channel.


Technologic by Melih Bayram Dede from ekim kaya on Vimeo.

The Inet-tr Conference

We'll be presenting a paper at the Inet-tr Conference on "Virtual Assistants" in Ankara. (ODTÜ, 22nd of December, 4:30-6:30 PM)

Here's the schedule

Update: Here's the video shot during the presentation:


Inet-tr Konferansı 2008 from ekim kaya on Vimeo.

Our virtual office in the US

Now we have a "virtual" presence in the form of a PO Box and a local phone number in the United States. We're hoping to announce the opening of a "real" New York office in the near future. :)

Time to spread the word. (And the product!)

We want virtual assistants to be used widely out on the web. So it's kind of a mission for us to make them available for any entity, corporate, or personal. As a part of this effort, we pre-launched the "build your own virtual assistant" tool. We set the official launch date as January 1st, and we'll be collecting valuable feedback from the beta tester community until then. Our PR monster Merve will be promoting the tool during her job, introducing it to some 1500 unique daily visitors of our website.

Although this product offers limited features compared to the Botégo-managed version, it still delivers the core elements of a virtual assistant that you can use on a personal website, blog, or even the corporate web site of an SME. In addition to the usual question&answer feature, it also functions as a guide, automatically navigating the user to the relevant page on the website (depending on the topic the question is related to) making it a really powerful tool. And it's totally free!

I had mentioned on a previous post that we collect transcripts to analyze the data they contain, in order to increase our expertise in language processing. Upon the launch of this product, that content will be of a broader and more diverse nature, since new transcripts from different sources will be pouring in, in compliance with the user agreement. So this is basicly a win-win situation. We're eager to see some working samples around the web! If you're interested in becoming a beta tester, jump into our "close beta test room" on Friendfeed.

Hello world!

We're also targeting international markets now. Not that the Turkish market has saturated or anything, it's a move we've been planning since the very first day. Our priority has always been creating a decent client base though. Now that we've reached that goal, our next step is to further extend the vision. We've already built a limited demo for a client candidate based in the US. It's a concrete example demonstrating language-independency of our product.

"How to start a business while you study"

Last week was a week of events. Here's the video shot by Televidyon team during the conference moderated by Etohum founder, Burak Büyükdemir.

Another microsite and another seminar

As an I.T.U. alumni, i was proud to have the opportunity to attend an MIS class, addressing students on entrepreneurship. Courtesy of Professor Halefsan Sümen, i'll do it again, tomorrow.

We've been bringing up the issues with the web, with a series of microsites. Here's the final one: http://www.insansorar.com (in Turkish)

A cool video conferencing experience

We participated in a conference held in Sakarya Universitesi by a student club, via Mogulus video streaming network. It was a lot of fun! More than 150 participants watched our demo videos and my presentation online, and asked their questions in the chat room. We love not only creating, but also using internet-based technologies.

What's wrong with the site search?

Our new viral marketing microsite brings up the question "What's wrong with the site search?" and discusses how major corporations fail with offering a decent site search tool to their clients.

http://www.aramadasorunne.com (in Turkish)

Our virtual assistant is a much more powerful tool increasing customer satisfaction while decreasing costs.

Correction of a miscommunication: Better late, than none...

I had mentioned an unfortunate incident of miscommunication in the following entry, almost a year ago: http://botego.blogspot.com/2007/11/good-pr-bad-pr.html

Apparently, the folks at Project House have acted responsibly to recover the consequences of this incident, and we appreciate that.

In the following paragraph, Business Development Manager for Groupe SEB acknowledges our function in the BoTefal project honoring our brand with a positive comment. We're pretty relieved by the fact that this advertorial was paid-for by Project House. The title says it all: "Better late, than none"

Introducing Bilge, the virtual assistant

It's been a tiring week at the CeBIT Bilisim exhibition, but our efforts have paid off. Turkey's leading provider of DSL services (with almost 95% market share) showcased our product in a special section prepared solely for the virtual character named "Bilge" (A female name standing for the term "wise"). Hundreds of visitors tested the product extensively, and the results are very promissing.

Here are some sample videos (all in WMV format) demonstrating what Bilge has to offer to users asking for help with:

Locating wi-fi hotspots

User instructions for operating the family protection system

Locating the nearest sales point

Step-by-step visual instructions for setting up the modem

Step-by-step visual instructions for locating connectivity issues

Something pretty irrelevant to the concept

There are many pre-determined scenarios where Bilge handles an inquiry or guides the user with visual instructions, every step of the way. More to come, so stay tuned!

Botégo call center solution

Here's a presentation (in Turkish) that demonstrates the advantages our call center solution offers. the video is also available in WMV format at: http://www.botego.com/videos/callcentercozumu.wmv (7.09 MB)


Botégo çağrı merkezi çözümü from ekim kaya on Vimeo.