SmarterChild's popularity spawned targeted marketing-oriented bots for Radiohead, Austin Powers, Intel, Keebler, The Sporting News and others. The company subsequently marketed Automated Service Agents-delivering immediate answers to customer service inquiries-to large corporations, like Comcast, Cingular, TimeWarner Cable, etc. The company generated no revenue from SmarterChild, but used it as a demonstration of the power of what Klein called “conversational computing”. SmarterChild provided information wrapped in fun and quirky conversation. The bundled domains were launched publicly as SmarterChild (on AIM initially) in June 2001. He suggested using “SmarterChild”, a username coined by Tim Kay which Tim was using to test various things. When Stephen Klein came on board as COO-and eventually CEO-he insisted that all of the disparate test “buddies” be launched together with the company’s highly-developed colloquial chat domain. None of the individual domains which the company had named “stocksBuddy”, “sportsBuddy”, etc. The original implementation took shape as a demo that Kay programmed in PERL in his Los Altos garage to connect a single buddy name, "ActiveBuddy", to look up stock symbols, and later allow AIM users to play Colossal Cave Adventure, a famous word-based adventure game, and MIT's Boris Katz Start Question Answering System but quickly grew to include a wide range of database applications the company called 'knowledge domains' including instant access to news, weather, stock information, movie times, yellow pages listings, and detailed sports data, as well as a variety of tools (personal assistant, calculators, translator, etc.). The concept for conversational instant messaging bots came from the founder's vision to add natural language comprehension functionality to the increasingly popular AIM instant messaging application. įounded in 2000, ActiveBuddy was the brainchild of Robert Hoffer and Timothy Kay, who later brought seasoned advertising executive Peter Levitan on board as CEO. SmarterChild became very popular, attracting over 30 million Instant Messenger "buddies" on AIM (AOL) and MSN and Yahoo Messenger over the course of its lifetime. It was widely distributed across global instant messaging networks. SmarterChild was an intelligent agent or "bot" developed by ActiveBuddy, Inc., with offices in New York and Sunnyvale. SmarterChild was a chatbot available on AOL Instant Messenger and Windows Live Messenger (previously MSN Messenger) networks. ( December 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations.
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