Many Uses

The ability to engage in dialogue with a body of text - be it Wikipedia, a movie script, or a book - radically changes radically changes information exchange.

Actors engage in narrative and dialogue, allowing interaction with text in progressively more efficient and effective methods. Actors can be inserted into your Web pages or via our API, which connects to your chat application, or favorite avatar in a virtual world or MMORPG. At its core, it is a new kind of reading technology, like the printing press, or the Web. And this technology, like the printing press or the Web,offers radical new opportunities.

Entertainment

Echo & Shadow Actors are capable of making entertainment properties interactive. By taking a movie script or character dialogue and importing it into the Echo & Shadow Platform™, entertainment properties such as video games, comics, cartoons, movie and TV franchises, and even interviews all become interactive entertainment.

Games

Actors can be used in all types of gaming, including casual and immersive applications. For example, an Actor can be employed in casual games as the voice of a chess opponent, offering advice for players that need it. Likewise in casino style games, actors can provide the voice of the opponent, or the dealer of the poker deck.

In immersive games there are massive possibilities with non-playing characters, or the "extras" that are in a video game. This offers great potential for Actors as the robots can serve as the residents of that fictional world, from delivering a quality first user experience (FUE), to conveying narrative and instruction such as the elf in the woods that advises you to go rescue the princess before the dragon comes.

Branded Characters

Famous and loved characters in TV, movies, animations, novels, comics, and even toys can become conversational with their fans, extending a franchise in a new and exciting way. Using the Echo & Shadow Platform™, it is now possible to talk with that character yourself, instead of just watching it on a screen. Because Bart Simpson™, Barbie™, and Mickey Mouse™ all have existing bodies of written content, it is simply a matter of importing that content into the Echo & Shadow Platform™ and generating actors from that static content. You can even fine-tune an Actor's "personality" by editing the interactive text, adjusting the tone, or emphasizing certain blocks of content more than others.

Communities

The social Web is defined by interaction among friends and connections. Email, blogs, chat, and home pages on social networks can be processed into Actors that can act and respond interactively when you are not online. For example, anyone that has written content (including your email outbox) may now create a kind of "answering machine" or version of themselves from that written content.

Business

Echo & Shadow Actors can function in many traditional business roles. Since much of business depends on the transfer of information via dialogue, Actors are able to serve complimentary roles in businesses and work environments that already have an online presence.

As with entertainment-based branded characters it is now possible to talk a company's brand representative. For example, Ronald McDonald™ may now espouse the virtues of Happy Meals™ and The Michellin Man™ may now explain why his tires are best.

Sales and Marketing

Company Websites, online product catalogues, and ecommerce sites today are designed to deliver information to end users through hierarchical layouts (eg, Home -> Men's -> Shirts -> Casual) and keyword searches that result in a product page. Real world selling, however, benefits from a live salesperson who can guide you to the right product, answers questions, offer alternatives and upsells, and finally close the sale.

Echo & Shadow Actors can now offer this same level of real-world customer interaction in a Website, offering a higher level of customer satisfaction and an increase in revenues.

Customer Service

Customer service is one of the largest cost centers for a business, having a direct negative impact on profits. Automated call centers and Web-based help and knowledge-base systems have greatly improved customer services in the last few years. However, these systems, like an ecommerce product catalogue, still require the customer to "hunt and peck" for information, either by searching or reading through a lot of text to find the desired information.

By taking an existing FAQ, knowledge-base, or body of help text, companies can save costs and improve customer service by employing an Echo & Shadow Actor integrated into their Website. Further, customer interactors with Actors continually add to the Echo & Shadow Actor database, improving future customer service experiences.

eLearning and Serious Games

Today's $67 billion elearning and serious games market includes segments such as academia, corporate training, modeling and simulation, as well as industrial and military simulations - all ideal for Echo & Shadow Actors. Classic online training manuals, passive video instruction, and multiple choice quizzes are giving way to fully interactive Web, Flash™, and 3D graphical role-playing systems. Echo & Shadow Actors can offer instruction and role-playing activities that better mimic real-life scenarios and improve the quality and retention of online training programs.

eLearning

Consider Echo & Shadow Actors as professors that answer questions, as tutors that provide guidance, as lecturers that give expositions, or as a research assistant. More interestingly, is that a book, such as the writings of Descartes or Plato, can be uploaded to an actor database and the actor will begin to talk like that book. In other words, the book becomes the teacher. This means that students can carry out their own Socratic dialogues, or talk with a work of literature as if they were speaking with its author.

Serious Games

Serious games generally refer to games used for training, simulation, or education. Serious games are intended to provide an engaging, self-reinforcing context in which to motivate and educate the "player". While serious games are proving to be enormously effective, most are based in a canned script where a player responds to the game activity by selecting a multiple choice answer or solution. By emplying an Echo & Shadow Actor, role-playing activities such as job training, sexual harrassment seminars, and overseas military cultural training, are more similar to real-life experiences, full of conversational nuances and patterns. Further, Actors can be integrated into existing learning management systems (LMS) and Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) systems for tracking and standardized scoring.

Other Uses

There are many possibilities for this technology, and we need your help inventing and building them. If you have ideas or suggestions, please let us know.