I met my future BDC agent

[Alex Snyder]

She is pretty young, but a sponge for learning.  I think she said she was born in 1991.  As young as she is, she is already attending Carnegie Mellon!  She’s a genius in certain areas, but only a genius in the areas she has been taught.  One of her talents, I’m interested in, is her ability to stick to a BDC sales script 100% of the time.  She is also good at giving customers directions to the dealership and knows every piece of inventory we have.  She can flip to taking and making service calls, and scheduling service appointments.  She is an excellent typist as well; sending personalized emails for just about any task.  Did I mention she speaks more than 7 languages?  I told you she was a genius.  She can also do all of this hundreds of times a second!

I met Abby.  Abby is the first of her kind, and will become the future business solution for companies who market over the phone and through email.

She is an advanced artificial intelligence based off of speech recognition programs.  For dealers, she will interact with our DMS and CRM tools to deliver anything we need her to deliver to our customers.  The demonstration I heard had a customer calling Abby to ask if a particular vehicle the customer saw on the dealer’s website was still in stock.  Abby graced through the call to earn A+’s at a BD College.  When the customer got off track, Abby had a simple question to bring the customer right back into the script.  On top of that, Abby was accessing the DMS to not only tell the customer that particular vehicle was still in stock but also told the customer about 2 other vehicles just like it.  Abby scheduled an appointment, took all of the necessary customer contact info (including a marketing source), got the customer to write down the manager’s name, and then gave the customer directions based off of Google Maps.  Aside from just interacting with a DMS and CRM, Abby can also use any website (while on the call) to deliver necessary information.

Abby is an impressive spectacle.  I am convinced she will become the forefront of a BDC while experienced BDC staff works behind her to handle the tougher customers.  I don’t have an exact time as to when she will be fully ready for prime time, but just know she is coming.  One day we may all GetAbby.

Article written by Alex Snyder.  Director of eCommerce for the Checkered Flag Auto Group.

 

[Joe Pistell]

Hello Alex,
You're looking well today... Alex, Do you
remember the year 2000? When computers began to mis-behave?
After reading this post and I saw the author was Alex, it all made sense. hahaha... One thing for sure Alex, you sure can write!
Get Abbyis not bad, but I'm still going to keep my
HAL9000

Too funny!
Joe

 

[Alex Snyder (blog)]

Joe,

It is unbelievable at first, but I'm confident this technology is going to improve and will be a viable solution in the future. I think Abby is much closer than HAL was. The GetAbby website does not give an accurate depiction of what she really is, and is the reason why I intentionally left a link to it out of the initial post. If you ever get the opportunity to demo GetAbby with R.F. Culbertson (the CEO), it might be more believable.

Funny you brought up HAL9000 because I forgot about that one. Thanks for the laugh!

-Alex

 

[bhoecht]

Abby is from a company called Eidoserve.

They use an Artificial Intelligence routine based upon the open source Artificial Intelligence markup language (AIML).

And whle AIML is quite good at recognizing typed inputs and after quite a bit of time can even be tuned to a specific user's voice (like with Dragon Naturally Speaking) as well as synthesizing answers that are relevant to the recognized input...

The rest of that post is pure marketing vapourware. All Abby is going to be able to do any time soon is speak pre-recorded talk tracks.

Multiple languages? Local dialects? Heck, accents confuse these programs beyond all hope still.

I like the story... I'll be the first in line when their is a functioning prototype that can do more than read a canned speech (like in their demo).

Go to www.alicebot.org to get some sense of reality around what is possible.

As heard back in late 2000, "Please Lord, just one more bubble..."

Alex... dude... the Ai in Ai-Dealer is for Artificial Intelligence... but only because I don't have any real intelligence of my own...

If you want the real skinny on Eidoserve, call or email Dr. Richard Wallace who is the CEO of the Ai-Foundation. You'll find him on the Alicebot site. His "ALICE" won the Loebner prize (annual contest for most human AI) enough that they changed the rules so each "AI" bot wasn't allowed to enter multiple years. Dr. Wallace came out of Carnegie Mellon and has some words of caution related to Eidoserve.

Caveat emptor.

(and for the record, I am all for humanizing our technology and stuff with strong value innovations)

 

[Greg Keeton]

I heard about this from some of the people who were at the same demonstration as Alex. These people aren't people who get excited too easy but they were all about this thing. I don't think we're ready to drop the money on this yet, but I can certainly see how a super aggressive dealer (like Alex) would be all about this.

Brian - I don't know what you do - I only know you are with Ai Dealer, but would something like this be your competition?

Thanks for pointing out Dealer Refresh Alex - I'm still trying to catch up on all the old articles!

 

[bhoecht]

Thanks for asking the question Greg. I am the founder of Ai-Dealer.

Ai-Dealer's product that we are in the market with is a shopping cart that dealers add on to their website to help raise website conversion levels, generate incremental website leads and facilitate direct sales (almost most are still happening from human follow up on unsold shopping carts)... which is our model.

We do use an avatar and have some AI capabilities, but Eidoserve is in different areas trying to monetize in different ways (i.e. they don't have a shopping cart), so I don't consider them to be a competitor.

If what they were touting were a commercially viable product, it would help my company's business since we do have an avatar in our shopping cart program and do have means of doing AI chats (although we don't do anything commercially with that part).

But I do know enough about the technology involved to know what is up and so shared what I know... which is the point of a blog.

Whether someone has integrity or a secret agenda can be difficult to discern on a blog, so thanks for the opp to say the above.

But no one has to listen to me... sign up for it and see what gets delivered. If it comes up short, just don't blame the technology.

 

[Alex Snyder (blog)]

I am getting the impression this article is being taken as me advocating GetAbby (Eidoserve), and that was not my intention. I just re-read the article, and can certainly see how someone would develop that assumption. Yes, I am looking into things deeper, and I appreciate you helping me with that Brian. The intention of this article was to educate the readers on what the future will bring....whether that future is next week or 20 years from now I do not know. Whether that future will be Abby or HAL is also unpredictable.

All the features I noted were pretty compelling as actual things GetAbby will be capable of doing in the future....according to the CEO. Whether it was a canned presentation, or vaporware, is inconclusive in the spirits of this article. This article is for awareness.

 

[Ashley Antonio]

We have been using Abby for a little over a month in our stores. Not only is it groundbreaking technology that is already being successfully used in other industries, but Abby has yet to call in sick, be hungover, have bad cramps or a negative attitude.

 

[CS]

"We have been using Abby for a little over a month in our stores."

Have you surveyed your customers and staff members to see if it really is handling requests and saving time?

 

[Greg]

I've had a good bit of experience with Abby technology – all of it very positive. Abby is currently helping dealerships:
- follow up with leads (through unique calls that educate consumer’s on the car of interest)
- remind consumers when they are due for a service appointment
- survey consumers to ensure high CSI ratings
- she can collect email addresses from consumers and deposit them into a DMS or CRM
- she can inform consumers when their car is ready to be picked up from the service department – and I’ve heard she will soon be able to accept payments over the phone
- she can inform your salesmen when an Internet lead has hit, and connect your salesmen with the consumer in under 2 minutes
- she can exist on the web as an avatar, and do live instant messaging with consumers… among other things.

Now, of those described above surveys and email collection involve relatively simple speech recognition - however, if you want to have Abby answer open ended questions, schedule appointments, check the availability of a particular vehicle, give directions… GetAbby (Eidoserve) will develop a custom solution for your dealership, and it’s going to cost 'big boy' dollars. But the technology is currently capable of handling these sorts of tasks.

FYI – Abby does NOT use AIML…