Acobot LLC, a Sunnyvale start-up, is launching its new breed of AI (artificial intelligence) chat technology that enables the 'training' of live chat robots so they can answer customer service queries in a smarter, apparently more intuitive and more efficient way than ever before. Users can create their own free live chat robot at http://acobot.com/ and train it to understand customers intelligently.

Sunnyvale, California August 23, 2012

Acobot's AI chat robot finally deals in a convenient, affordable way with the complex fact that human language meaning is highly flexible, with entirely different sentences putting across the same ideas. For example: "what are your prices?", "how much do you charge?" and "what do I need to pay?" mean the same thing. It is possible that hundreds, or even thousands, of unique sentences could all ask about a company's prices.

Previously, to work round the issue of synonyms (different words meaning the same thing) and synonymous phrases, most AI chat systems had to list as many patterns as possible in their knowledge base, or to establish sets of highly elaborate rules. Using these systems was time-consuming and they tended to be expensive, restricting them to banks, airlines and other big players.

Thanks to the AI live chat software developed by Acobot, it is now much more straightforward to 'train' a chat robot to recognize synonymous patterns and respond properly. While traditional AI chat technologies can't efficiently match a client's fresh questions to existing questions in the knowledge base, the Acobot chat technologies can recognize patterns and establish sets of complex rules on the fly.

Vic Duan, founder and CEO of Acobot LLC, comments: "The older breed of live chat robots either can't answer many common questions, even after training, or they're too expensive for most companies. In contrast, our new AI chat robot can be trained just by chatting with her, meaning that average people who don't have specialist AI knowledge or programming skills can quickly create their own personalized chat robot to answer the sorts of queries their customers ask."

To 'train' their robot, users simply log into acobot.com and ask their robot a question, which she'll answer. If the user thinks the answer can be improved, they type a better reply. The robot will learn from the 'better reply' immediately, and users can keep training her until they are satisfied with her performance. They are then ready to install the robot on their own website, for customer support or conversion optimization purpose.

As Acobot continuously makes breakthroughs in AI technologies, its robot learns from people by analogy. For example, if the owner teaches their robot to answer the question "what are your prices?" the robot will be able to answer similar questions such as "how much do I need to pay?".

Says Vic Duan, "Instead of investing weeks or months of AI expert time, the average person can now create a well-trained live chat robot in just a few hours."

Non-commercial website owners can create their own free, live chat robot with unlimited use at http://acobot.com . For commercial users there is a range of price plans, including a free plan and then paid-for plans starting at $29/month. Paid-for plans do not include Acobot branding.