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Wednesday, February 06, 2002 |
ActiveBuddy lets companies control bots "The program highlights the company's aggressive efforts to expand the capabilities of instant messaging, which is slowly evolving from offering informal personal chats to supporting applications such as file-sharing and videoconferencing, as well as multiplayer games. ActiveBuddy has been working to make its technology the de facto standard for creating interactive agents. For instance, someone could ask a bot when a movie is playing in a certain neighborhood and receive a short response that lists show times. The company said it hopes to see bots sitting on most IM users' buddy lists within the next year or so." [at News.com]
If you haven't played with SmarterChild (ActiveBuddy's first demo bot), you should. It's interesting, if for no other reason than to show how great librarians are. I'll bet you'll be surprised at some of the things it can do for you.
Still, I can foresee possible uses for this. Library hours, answers to questions in your local ready reference file, registration for programs, maybe even integration with the OPAC to let you know when your ILL request is in. What if one way to search the OPAC would be via IM on your cell phone? Maybe this could be the automated "Wal-Mart greeter" and the second-level of questions goes to a human being. Just thinking out loud here....
Hey, Paul - you want control, eh? Maybe this could get interesting with some grant money. Want to come out and play?
4:29:44 PM 
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Libraries trying to reach teens " 'They're the customers of the future,' said Penny Halle, a public services librarian at the Muskego Public Library. 'If we turn them off in seventh grade because they can't find anything here for them or they can't find a friendly face, what makes anyone think they're going to come back when they're 22?' " [via Library Stuff]
Excellent point! It's great that these libraries are implementing discussion groups, and I'm not putting down books or print in any way, but we have to be much faster to adopt other types of outreach to teens to prove to them we're still relevant in their lives (now and in the future). If they can't reach us in ways that are natural for them, then we won't exist in their world.
1:51:38 PM
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The Next Generation Customer Communication Platform "In the not-too-distant future, we will begin seeing unified customer support platforms that allow companies and their customers to communicate seamlessly via the Web, telephone, and wireless devices. In this article, we will learn how two evolutionary trends are creating a new generation of unified customer communication platforms. The lines between a phone customer and a Web customer are going to blur." [at VoiceXML Planet, via WebDeveloper.com]
This illustrates my theory that in the future, libraries will have a version of the "Wal-Mart greeter" handling incoming communications, whether via email, Instant Messaging (IM), SMS, or telephone. And for a long time, that intermediary will be a human being. Most libraries have moved to automated answering systems for incoming phone calls, but that doesn't work well in the world of electronic communications (except maybe for an email autoresponder acknowledging we got your message and will respond).
We have to shift in order to communicate with our patrons in their world, not ours. We can no longer sit behind a desk waiting for a phone call.
8:56:06 AM
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Comments by: YACCS
© Copyright 2002 Jenny Levine.
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