Leading Edge R&D:

vReps, AUTOMATED VIRTUAL REPRESENTATIVES

As reported by Sabra Chartrand, for many online businesses, a Web site means never having to deal with a live person. The hope is that customers will find information about the business, order products and seek technical support online, 24 hours a day, at a fraction of traditional overhead costs.

But that kind of customer service is only as good as the speed, accuracy and relevance of the information a site offers. How many people have abandoned a Web site in frustration, demanding to speak to a real customer-service person?

Walter Tackett, chief executive of a San Francisco company called NativeMinds, has patented a software technology called automated virtual representatives, or vReps. It conducts customer service, sales and marketing for online businesses.

The vReps are computer-generated images -- sometimes animation, sometimes photos of real models -- that answer customer questions in real time using natural language. Users type in their questions, and the responses appear on screen next to the image of the vReps.

Mr. Tackett and the co-inventor, Scott Benson, say the technology can mimic and even replace human customer service operators at a fraction of the cost, whether a business has traditionally used phone, fax, e-mail or live conversation to deal with customers.

The invention came about from research NativeMinds conducted on what consumers and companies wanted from a virtual customer services force. Consumers, the company found, did not care whether the character contained enormous amounts of universal knowledge; they just wanted fast, accurate answers in their specific subject area. Companies wanted virtual customer support software they could easily maintain. They did not want to hire a computer engineer to run the program.

"They want to be able to put a code monkey on it," Mr. Tackett explained. "That's a liberal arts major involved in HTML or Java, someone not formally trained in computer science or as an artificial intelligence or natural language expert."

So Mr. Tackett and Mr. Benson developed software based on pattern recognition and learning by example.

"The key thing is to get the user not to pick up the phone and talk to a person," Mr. Tackett said. "The key to that is to get the vRep to answer all the questions that can be reasonably answered and have a high probability of being correct."

To do that, the patented software starts with the answers and works backward. A vRep might be programmed with thousands of answers, each of which has a set of questions that could prompt the answers. Each answer could have dozens of questions associated with it. The number depends on how many ways the query could be phrased.

"The examples are archetypes or prototypes of inputs that should trigger an answer," Mr. Tackett said. "The invention runs each example through the system as if someone has put it in. The paradigm we typically use is learning by example. Here's what we want the vRep to say, and we give an example of how people may phrase their question to get that output.

"For example, someone might ask, 'Who the heck is this Walter guy?' Or, 'Tell me about Walter,' " he said, referring to himself.

The system comes with a self-diagnostic, he added, so that it can "take all the examples it ever learned and verify that it still remembers them correctly." The self-test is to prevent information from one area generating an incorrect answer in another.

"Someone might ask, 'Who is the president?' " he said. "That could be a question no one has ever asked before. They might mean, 'Who is the president of the U.S.?' But the system would say, 'Walter.' This is a classic problem of vReps." The self-test would periodically find and eliminate incorrect answers, based on the responses that users provide, he said.

Companies like Coca-Cola, Ford and Oracle are using the vReps software for various functions on their Web sites.

Mr. Tackett said research had determined that virtual representatives could save money, an aspect that surely appeals to embattled e-businesses.

"A vRep costs less than a dollar a conversation, while Forrester Research has pegged phone calls to a real customer service person at an average of $30 each," Mr. Tackett said.

"With a vRep, the length of the conversation doesn't affect the cost because it's maintained by one person," he added.

Not all of the programming is technical or product-oriented.

"Our vRep has to be able to answer 200 questions that we call banter," Mr. Tackett said. "They're about the weather, are you a boy or girl, will you go out with me? They're ice breakers."

He and Mr. Benson received patent 6,259,969.

Someday, when a sales pitch for faux gems or a thigh-trimming exercise machine transfixes a television watcher, it may not be necessary to reach for the telephone to order. Dan Erlin, an inventor from Redwood City, Calif., has won a patent for a system for swiping a credit card through a TV remote control.

Mr. Erlin invented a remote control containing an infrared transmitter, a magnetic stripe reader and a key pad. A user would pass a credit, debit or bank card through the slot, much as is done at the grocery store or with an automated teller machine. He would then key in information about the transaction and his personal identification number. The transmitter would send the purchase order to a processor in a set-top box that communicates with the retailer.

Mr. Erlin writes in his patent that the invention could be used in a hotel casino, with a cable TV home shopping network, or at an off-track betting site. He received patent 6,275,991.