2007 Robot of the Year selected

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has announced the winners of the annual Robot Award, established last year to recognize outstanding developments in the field of robotics and encourage further research. The Grand Prize 2007 Robot of the Year went to an industrial robot from Fanuc Ltd. called M-430iA. This super-fast two-armed industrial robot system is equipped with visual tracking functions optimized for work on food and pharmaceutical manufacturing lines. The winner’s pair of multi-axis robot arms can accurately pick up 120 items per minute as they move along a conveyor belt, and they can work non-stop 24 hours a day.

Additional prizes were presented to four other robots, including ZMP’s miuro, a robotic blood sample courier system developed by Matshushita, miniature AC servo actuators developed by Harmonic Drive Systems, and an MR image-guided surgical robot system developed by Hitachi and several universities.

InteliWISE’s virtual assistant won another prize.

IniteliWISE’s Virtual Stewardess received a Webstar award in the Travel & Tourism category in this year’s edition of a prestigious competition, Webstarfestival. The contest’s goal is to promote portals acknowledged by both well known, respected professionals and net surfers to be the best Polish www sites.

Katarzyna, a virtual stewardess created by specialists at InteliWISE, is located on the PLL LOT Polish Airlines website – http://www.lot.com/. She indeed resembles a real woman – both in appearance and behavior. Wanna see for yourself? Click “Twój asystent” on the PLL LOT website... and then do nothing. Watching Katarzyna wait for your action is a great pleasure.

InteliWISE AVATAR awarded again

InteliWISE virtual assistant has received an award as the most interesting broadband product in the Computerworld contest – BROADBAND 2007.

The head of the competition Jury, Mr Zbigniew Kądzielski, said that the Jury decided in favour of the InteliWISE AVATAR because of its technological advancement and the fact, that it was created in Poland.

The InteliWISE AVATAR makes browsing Internet sites easier even for users not familiar with the World Wide Web. The core of the product, which uses broadband, is a visual module – combining video and audio files. InteliWISE AVATAR's knowledge comes from separate knowledge basis: the client's, basic, RSS channels and Internet resources. This solution is already in implementation i.e. on LOT Polish Airlines' website.

InteliWISE awarded for avatars

InteliWISE AVATAR – the flagship product of a renowned Polish company InteliWISE - was awarded a medal in the INNOVATION 2007 Competition during the Industrial Technology, Science and Innovation Fair, organized by Gdansk International Fair Co. The company was also awarded a special prize, the Cup from the President of the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development, in recognition of its solutions presented there. The InteliWISE show box, where InteliWISE STAND and InteliWISE AVATAR were presented, drew the attention of many visitors.

InteliWISE provides innovative AI solutions, aiming to support on-line transactions and friendly customer care. Making use of intelligent technologies, the company supports on line customer service, search of information and boosts e-marketing. The InteliWISE AVATAR - one of the world's most advanced "virtual human" applications - a virtual advisor allowing for "almost natural" contact between Web user and the Web site. InteliAssistant is basing on a multi-source knowledge base and Natural Language Processing, which allows it to recognize user's commands written in natural language. The interactivity of the Assistant is supported by multimedia: dynamic animation and multi language speech synthesis. This virtual agent can be easily added-on to your company or personal Web Site within one day and then customized to the company's needs and Web Site content.

Zabaware wins the “most human” computer of the year prize

Zabaware’s Ultra Hal Assistant software won the 17th annual Loebner Prize Competition for Artificial Intelligence. The company’s awarded chatterbot software will give your computer a personality using AI, speech recognition technology, and real-time animation. Ultra Hal can be used as an entertainment program, a companion, or an office assistant. It learns from conversations, evolving and improving the more it talks with a person. In addition to chat it can perform such useful functions as remembering and reminding of appointments, keeping an address or a phone book, dialing phone numbers, launching programs and recent documents on command, and more. Ultra Hal will even offer you help with most of your Windows programs. And, last but not least, the Zabaware software utilizes an advanced realtime 3D character engine that delivers 3-D artificial human characters so convincing and engaging you could swear they were real.

The Loebner Prize is an annual competition where software programs attempt to convince human judges that they are actually people. In a Turing Test a judge talks with 2 “entities” - a human and a computer - simultaneously through a text-based instant messaging system. It is up to the judge to decide which is which.