First commercial B2C product

Gizem (Mystery) showed us that there's a huge potential in commercial consumer bots. Thanks to the power of one of the largest Facebook groups with almost 900.000 members along with a mobile payment system by the market leader GSM operator Turkcell, Gizem held more than 8000 chat sessions in less than 24 hours. We have two products: A regular 3-minute chat session and a premium service where Gizem personally deals with the user. The first one costs 2.99 TRY, where the premium sells for 19.90. This is a great success story in terms of the product, the ability to generate targeted traffic and effective integration of the mobile payment system. Our new B2C products are on the way, so stay tuned!

Another press coverage

HRBot was featured on Iste Insan, courtesy of Onur Uysal

Yet another article

A modest article on Hurriyet, written from a recent press release of ours.

ISA's are the future of the web. Don't take our word for it! (You might want to take MIT's, though)

Technology Review, published by MIT, lists "Intelligent Software Assistants" among "10 Emerging Technologies of 2009". We couldn't agree more.

Check it out: http://www.technologyreview.com/specialreports/specialreport.aspx?id=37

(Notice how successful they were predicting the ones back in 2001)

Update: Here's the related press release

Get a promotion!

Our fourth microsite is addressing those suffering from the consequences of the economic crisis. We advise that Botégo will help them stand out in their team and have the attention of their bosses who expect them to:

Increase sales (with our characters creating the WOMM effect)

Reduce costs (with our intelligent personal agents reducing customer service load)

Increase customer satisfaction (with the same agents helping customers find what they want, when they want, without having to deal with annoying call center queues)

Work more efficiently (with our knowledgebase tools that prevent unefficient forms of interaction)

Work with the right people (with the new released product, the "HRBot"

Here how it looks:

Introducing Yildiz, the star of Yedigun

We built a new female character named Yildiz (Star) for Yedigun, a sister company of PepsiCo. Yedigun has been organizing the annual song contest Yedigun Yildizlari (Yedigun Stars) for a couple of years now, and Yildiz helps prospective contestants with the rules and provides the tension-release they need before they shoot their video.

Yazboz: A great web of interrelated keywords

The first time i saw Yazboz, i remember thinking "one day, this database will be worth millions of dollars". The idea is simple: "Building the relational web of every word in the dictionary."

The task of coding the complex algorithms behind the technology, encouraging people to manually map the connections between nodes in common sense, and keeping the data clean and accurate is far from easy, though. So, even in relatively early stage of the project, Can Altineller and Ozgur Oktay, two bright people behind the project deserve a lot of credit. The only way to handle this labor-intense task could be through cleverly designing the flow, so that people would enjoy what they're doing, and they did so by positioning the project as a web-based game.

No matter which language you deal with, this database is a very important asset now, given that we're in the beggining of a whole new era, that will revolutionalize the way the web works, thanks to semantic technologies. By the way, Can has worked on various other interesting projects, so don't forget to check out his website.

So the news is; Can and Ozgur had announced that developers could use their API to use the Yazboz data in their projects. Botégo is the first company to use the API in a commercial manner. But since our product requires 100% accuracy in terms of content, this is kind of an exclusive partnership where we'll be using not only the content, but also the technology to keep it clean while it keeps expanding each day.

The concrete result of this partnership will be available to users on our next project we're building for an international soda company. I'm so excited for having the opportunity, and i would like to thank Yazboz team on behalf of ours.

"Bring me fifty fantastic transcripts!"

Our senior (referring not to his age but his experience) software engineer Çağatay builds some gadgets we use in order to develop new products (and also have fun) in his spare time. What you see on the screenshot is the result of a query for the word "fantastic" in our database, returning 50 results as requested. (Disclaimer: Some might find the content inappropriate as it includes the entries from Merve's transcripts.) You can do the same for the words as unusual as "scholastic", "pretentious" and "hybrid".

The tool functions as a platform for our R&D activities, and the content represents the asset we've built so far.

Playing with the words is what we basically do, and it is a lot of fun!

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.