What It Is

It is currently possible to give life to a body of text such as a book, movie script, or wikipedia entry and make it interactive. Rather than simply reading text we may now converse with it. Interactive texts may now ask and answer questions, inform and offer insight, and even make jokes.

Actors can be programmed to play any role, such as a non-playing character in your game or virtual world, a chatbot on your Website, or an instructor for an e-learning project.

The Echo & Shadow Platform™

The Echo & Shadow Platform™ is a hosted (or licensed) suite of software services that takes non-interactive content and produces a conversational robot. We call these robots Actors. Actors can be programmed to play any role, such as a chatbot on your Website, a non-playing character in your game or virtual world, or an instructor for an e-learning project.

How It Works

Administration Dashboard - Web-based account management where you create and manage your Actors.
Actor Creation - Import or Web crawl any content, such as scripts, Web pages, blogs, speeches, and text documents. Your content is parsed with Echo & Shadow's natural language processing and an emotion engine. This patented process takes apart, looks at the meaning, and reconstructs your content into an interactive text (aka Actor).
Actor Management - Edit the interactive text, add or fine tune elements such as personality (eg. tone and behaviors), and embed your Actor in a Website through simple widget code or attach it to a non-playing character in a game through our API.
User Interaction - End users interact with your Actor through text chat, instant messaging, and in the near future, voice over IP (VOIP). Your actor can ask and answer questions, provide sales and help information, role play, and perform in your game or entertainment project. Actors learn and improve through user interaction, which builds their interactive database.

Some Features

Architecture & Administration
• Built on industry-standards and open for third-party extension
• Integration with Google Web services and Amazon cluster services
• OpenID integration for authentication
• Cluster load balancing management
• EJB annotation integration for clustered data
• User roles & permissions service
• Content emotion analysis, semantic similarity, and grammar linking
• Systems for integrating web content into a hierarchical tree
• WordNet integration for post-scrape analysis

Actor Creation & Management
• Web-based tools
• Document importing (scripts, text, etc.)
• Parsing tools tailored specifically for blogs
• Content spiders for social networks, blog software, & Wikipedia
• Customize and test your Actor in real-time
• Simple rule system with editor
• Hierarchical data graph editor
• Tracking of conversational history
• JackRabbit JCR CMS for actor & content management
• Interfaces for working with avatars on different sites
• Test and tune emotion and content ratings
• Manage & edit content tags
• Performance profiling & usage statistics

Embedding & Integrating Actors
• Jabber chat integration
• Integration with Yahoo chat
• Ability to output character's chats as blog entries
• Integration with Facebook (or other social networking sites)
• API for integrating into 3rd-party applications, games, and platforms

... you get the idea.