Tubitak support to our R&D activities

Tubitak recently issued a grant to Botego, as an acknowledgement of our R&D efforts. The amount we'll be receiving represents the fullest extent permitted by the law. We're flattered, and and feel obligated to set the bar even higher.

HRBot is already a success!

HRBot has been attracting a lot of attention both from media and prospects. Congratulations once again go to Tugba Avci, for using our support very effectively and turning it into a success story. We hope to be announcing working examples on reputable corporations very soon.

HRbot is tested in a real-world-environment!

Official news agency of Turkey, "Anadolu Ajansi" recently distributed a press release of ours, announcing that HRbot was tested successfully on Bogazici University graduate students. Despite the fact that our brand was removed from the release, the impact is quite significant.

Congratulations go to our program director Tugba Avci and Software Engineer Nazmi Zorlu.

Business & pleasure

I'll be representing Tele.com.tr Magazine at the Webby Awards, followed by a couple of visits to VC offices located in lovely New York City. Although i consider both tasks as pleasures, should i manage to make a good pitch, the second one might as well convert into a business. So, we can start a long journey through the Wall Street.

Introducing the "commercial Merve": Ebru.

Our second B2C product is a variation of Merve. Ebru also aims to improve communication skills of gentlemen. Users are required to pay a flat fee of TRY 1 for each attempt. Every 200th attempt is entitled to win a brand new Nokia cellphone in return.

This is the first time we'll be making use of sweepstakes, so this is a lot of fun!

Should a user be successful on his online date with Ebru, we issue a certificate in his name, that can be printed right away, to demonstrate one's skills as a romantic gentleman. It looks something like this:

Some news

1- I had the opportunity to adress Bogazici University students at the "Bilişen" event.
2- We're delighted to have been short listed by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the "Hizli Balik Awards".
3- Gizem will be hitting the 10.000 session remark today. Second B2C project is on the way. We're excited!

Building trust

We're about to launch a project for o.b., a Johnson&Johnson product. The brand deserves to communicate with the user in a special way and we'll be doing so, where "trust" will be our priority. We'll collect profile information and run a sampling project also.

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!

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:

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.

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.

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!

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.

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)

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!