My first ‘comment’ addresses a number of the products currently ‘off the shelf.’ Now, what products will be off the shelf in the future? Wow, great question. The interesting thing about Abby is that she gains intelligence by interacting with people. So within a couple years she will be able to answer nearly all of the ‘common’ questions people ask when purchasing a vehicle, for example; and within a couple years she will be able to answer tons of questions concerning medicine – since Abby is currently entrenched in the automobile and pharmaceutical industries. So a very ‘near future’ off the shelf Abby product would be something like ‘Automotive Abby’ - who is essentially a genius when it comes to vehicles, dealership operations, & prospective car buyers.

This is so fascinating! I am dying to hear example of ABBY handling calls. I went to both websites (Get ABBY and the Alice site) and tried interacting with the avatars and I wasn't impressed. They were way off base in about 3 lines, but I guess handling a phone up wouldn't be too chatty and more standardized.

The Alice site is super budget and I don't understand it at all. It's nothing about Alice handling calls, it's more about Alice being an avatar on your site. But, she wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed even if she is an award winner. The other avatars on the site were uber freaky. I think one of them is anorexic. Avatars in general freak me out though. They are so ugly and I can't get over the mouth being out of sync.

I am not totally ruling out dating one, as long as its mouth didn't move. Actually, that's how I feel about most guys come to think about it!

It was great speaking to you too, Alex. I'd love to meet you on your next visit to NYC. I am off to Digital Dealer/AAISP thing in Vegas. I'll keep everyone posted on anything interesting that may come up. Not sure if it will be anything groundbreaking, but I'll probably have some good US Weekly style gossip to share.

There ya go Jeff - if she ever talks back, just reprogram her. No need to ever lose another argument again! The ladies could program it to say intelligent things....I think world peace may be near.

Greg - thanks for joining in on the conversation and shedding a little light on Abby's programming. I think the people reading this thread will be interested in the "off-the-shelf" products Abby will be able to provide down the road - care to mention what some of those capabilities will be?

Ashley - thank you for your time the other day. You helped to reaffirm some of my thoughts and it was a pleasure speaking to someone who is on her game!

As well for ladies, excuse me.

Do they have an Abby we could program as a girlfriend?

From what I have heard from customers and staff, Abby is a real time saver. She is able to give customers relevant information such as price quotes immediately and in the event that someone needs to be transferred to a rep there is a press 1 connect option.

as I mentioned to Alex: FYI - Abby is not 'keyword' based, but rather grammatically based - since she breaks apart each sentence into subject, noun, verb, and adjective – in order to capture the true meaning and references required for normal conversation. It's actually the same philosophy that is being used for 'google on the phone' and for the latest 'voice search technology' that is being put into beta this week for searching the web. Both methods are consistent with Abby's because all came out of CMU within the last 5 years.

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…

"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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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)

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

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

WOW it's 2012 and dot coms are stronger than ever.  Dealers are quaking in the shoes over Zag, Truecar, Edmunds, etc.  

Nice post, Jeff. Reading this article today made me laugh.

The factories might continue to shrink the new vehicles sales field, but they're losing ground in the used sector. With a few bulk feeds, smaller sites can be just as visible to consumers because of sites like Oodle.

Money will be thrown at projects like myride.com, but generating leads comes down to having an inventory of cars for sale and exposure to the market, which is something that anyone can do without a million dollars.

Selling vehicles online is a funnel process. You advertise the vehicle online, the customer searches for their vehicle, your listing is appealing, they click on it, they email your dealership and include a phone number for you to contact them. Once an email lead turns into a phone lead it then hopefully converts to an appointment, the customer then physically sees, smells, drives the vehicle they are interested in and hopefully purchase the vehicle. This will go on this way for sometime to come. If I had a dime for every prognosticator of wisdom that stated "Cars will be sold directly online thru email with little or no sales person involvement" several years back, I'd be a millionaire. Customers buy from people they like, that they've had repoire built over the phone and then in person, from an actual sales person. If I was asked what would be the biggest probable "Sales Prevention Tool" that could ever be implemented by a dealership, it would have to be adding a robotic voiced voice mail tree type of customer response system from internet generated advertising on vehicles. I can envision seeing Call Bright reports with call durations of 8 seconds. C'mon guys, people buy from people they like and they need to see & feel the car before making the commitment. It's the sizzle not the steak. Systems like this are purely steak.

I miss Pete Perrota. I think he left automotive. I knew him from the Auto Retailing On the Web (AROW) conferences that he ran. I even spoke at one... Heck, the year was 2000 and I was on the speaking circuit as a CRM "expert." 937-643-1189 if you find and read this Pete.

www.ai-dealer.com/CAW%20CRM%20Oct%202000%20Article.pdf

I found that artile several months ago and left some comments after it on the original post... even tried to hunt down Pete and Sheldon Sandler afterwards to see what they thought of brick and mortar car dealers adopting shopping cart based ecommerce as Web 2.0 on the Internet or "click and mortar" as has happened in every other industry.

Shopping cart based ecommerce is here. Not just Ai-Dealer. Lithia has a custom solution built for their new used car superstore (www.L2.com - sorry folks, it apparently only runs if you have an ADP DMS), AutoNation will apparently be out with one soon too, my last company NeoSynergy has one www.neosynergy.net/products_buydirect.html, and others even automate dealership price responses as auto responders (in exchange for your email address of course - My Live Offer, Rednumbat).

Shopping cart based ecommerce is coming to automotive. You can either get one or learn to compete with one... hopefully when that happens dealers will finally start to learn how to make their websites somewhere worth going for consumers. I wrote about it last week in my management briefing series. If you would like some free ideas of what I had in mind, you can read it here.


If you would like me to add you to my newsletter list, just send me an email to bhoecht (at) ai-dealer.com

Great post Jeff... Seven years old and still very bang on.

This is a great article and looking back allows us at times a clearer image of where we are going.

Many manufacturers selling products through retailers and dealers were slow to embrace the Internet as a sales & marketing tool for fear of alienating channel partners. The idea of B2B trade exchanges as the means to lowest price using online auctions and sales proved to be by almost any measure a failure except via ebay and some of the larger independents. It maybe due to their huge success that there are not more competitors in this market.

Many manufacturers are still trying to figure out how to get closer to consumers online. Their biggest fear is in alienation of their dealers and channel partners. However when one OEM develops a successful model the others who are smart will follow quickly.

The real value of Internet marketing isn't talking to customers, but listening to them, which is the basis of the "Toyota Plan" to establish a more direct channel to their clients.

Another key integration leading to a more effective online presence is that of customer relationship management (CRM) systems which will improve over the next few years. Look at how much they have improved in the last few years and there are more companies now in the game, quality companies producing quality solutions.

Pity the poor company signing a contract to be locked into a 5-year agreement today with one of these "archaic" legacy companies.

This type of marketing relationship, OEM-Consumer, aligns the desires and wants of consumers with the capabilities of the "OEM Company", and the success results in a loyal customer.

Korea is a classic example of this as they have 23 million Internet users, one of the highest percent based to the country's population in the world.

KAMA (Korean Automobile Manufacturers Association) is an active model of how Korean OEM's are using the Internet to reach their Korean customers. It may pay some of the US Dealers to research this. As we all know Korea is moving very quickly up the ladder.

Some automotive manufacturers have been in the forefront of this change, streamlining their supply chains via the dealers and establishing a trading exchange, Toyota, Ford, and General Motors, are able to better manage the entire order-to-delivery process and differentiate offerings to customers according to their value, some better than others.

Toyota and Ford were one of the first auto manufacturers to use the Internet to reach Hispanic customers with great success. Even today, 2007, you will find dealers in Hispanic communities without a Hispanic site as part of their ecommerce solution…. Go Figure? The Hispanic market continues to be the fastest-growing consumer segment in the U.S.

Some OEM's for the most part know this and strive to offset the lag and inefficiencies of the present system.

Via the Internet, more power has shifted to the customer, and those companies that are able to integrate their supply chain and their customer strategies via the Internet will achieve breakthrough performance.

To date this channel has been filtered through the dealer system so the data in many cases is skewered. As the OEM companies centralize their process and channel direct to the consumer they will receive back exactly what the consumers are looking for, the complaints, ideas, desires and suggestions, also the OEM will be able to give the consumer correct product information and eliminate much of the misinformation that is in the market place today.

That's definitely an interesting article to bring back. As I was reading it (and I skipped over how the article was written in 2000), I found myself vehemently disagreeing with some parts.

A few of the obvious parts left out of the arguments were laws and regulation around the sale of cars. I know that Ford has/tried a direct car model as did Carsdirect, but they both ended up being blocked by regulation.

Franchised dealers have better access to inventory and may always control certain sections of the market, but there will always be room for creative, independent dealers. Look at Carliquidators.com or Evenlevel.com.

Finally, obviously eBay Motors has managed to make a play as a dot com selling used cars, and I didn't see a single mention of them in the article. Certainly VC capital has dried up for web 1.0 companies that try to change distribution channels through the internet, but not for social sites that change interactions.

Great idea on the post Jeff...

Personally, I was not yet in this space 8 years ago but have done my best to catch up on the industry, trends, etc. I would have to agree that there will most likely come a day when there will not be a need for lead aggregators - although I am not sure that day is "just around the corner" just yet. For the management / ownership of maybe a few few thousand dealerships who have taken time to understand the Internet (SEM, auto specific search sites, online newspapers, blogging, etc) and leverage its power; there are thousands more who do not seem to care about understanding the Internet at all. Most seem to consider having visually appealing, flash heavy websites as "doing enough" on the Internet.

There seem to be plenty of tools, vendors, etc. to help dealerships break away from the need to buy leads. The problem is, in a lot of cases, no one at the dealership level really takes time to become educated on the Internet and how to best implement those tools(SEO, PPC, Blogging, RSS, etc.) at their dealership. Until more owners and GM's make this a priority, lead providers will most likely continue to find ways to add to their value proposition; which in quite a few cases still yields higher ROI than some traditional advertising methods.