Customer Service, With a Smile

Lonnie Benson, CEO of Humanity Interactive LLC, hopes to bring realistic facial expressions to the web.

Even avatars can get emotional, it seems. At least, thats
what Human Interactivity believes. The Kirkland-based company is betting it can
bring more lifelike behavior to artificial intelligence. Or, more specifically,
it wants to bring a smiling, talking and interactive human face to those
digital representatives of human beings found in online games, websites and
customer service portals throughout the internet.

Our belief is that in the future you will be having
conversations with virtual people, says CEO Lonnie Benson, who was also the
founder of Whos Calling Inc., a Texas-based company that produces customer
relationship and sales management technology. The technology has arrived.

Humanity Interactives plan is to embed micro-expressions
into the facial respones of avatars. The companys software can record
someones face, read the minute expressions and muscle movements, and apply
those changes to what might otherwise resemble little more than well-drawn
cartoon characters.

In other words, when you complain about your bill to a
virtual agent, that avatar might be able to express what will look like real
sympathy.

Already, a variety of companies employ avatars in customer
relationship management programs. Alaska Airlines virtual assistant Jen has
taken about 3.5 million questions in her first year of service. Type in a
complaint, such as You lost my bags! and Jen replies, relaying a list of
phone numbers to call for assistance.

What Jen doesnt do, however, is empathize. She wears the
same smile regardless of how upset or ebullient the questioner.

Combine that interaction with text-to-speech conversion and
you get what Benson believes will be a powerful tool for customer relationship
management and for sales. Thats because, notes Benson, people inherently trust
avatars more than they trust real people. Humans have evolved to respond
positively to certain facial stimulisuch as a smile. And Benson and his team
can recreate those stimuli in virtual forms.

If a person online smiles at you, youll smile a little
bit, says Benson. Text is cool, but quite frankly, words are not enough. We
want that emotion.

Incorporating emotion and text-to-speech interactivity into
customer service may also be more cost-effective. According to Forrester Research,
the cost of the average web self-service sessiongoing one-on-one with a
virtual agentis $1. E-mail responses cost $10 on average, and a telephone
conversation averages $33 a call.

Now three years old, Humanity Interactive now
has its first official client, a company from Venezuela.