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Virtual Elves: Keebler IM Bots


You can't get Becky to talk about anything besides recipes. I try to change the subject, but it constantly comes back to the kitchen. So while our conversations aren't deep, at least she's always there when I'm trying to figure out what to make for dinner. The other day, for example, I told her I like Turkish food.

"Wait, what? Sorry, I don't get it," she answered. She's perky, but she often gets perplexed. "Tell me another way." Becky sometimes has a hard time thinking beyond the boundaries of her suburban Chicago neighborhood.

"I like food from Turkey," I clarified.

"Okay, you'd like to see a recipe with turkey. I know! What about roast turkey with apple-cider glaze?"

I took a broader tack. "I mean that I like Middle Eastern food."

"Okay, you'd like to see a Middle Eastern recipe. Let me take a gander at what I have. Ah ha!" Becky offered up a recipe for a falafel flaxseed sandwich. And then, a second later, she blurted out, "Keebler Vanilla Wafers—so good, they could only be made by Elves!"

"Becky" is an interactive agent called RecipeBuddie, an instant-messaging bot developed to promote the Keebler brand on the Internet. Her job is to mimic natural conversation with consumers who contact her via IM, to suggest picks from a database of more than seven hundred recipes, based on user criteria. And, of course, she reminds users to buy Keebler products. Her mention of Vanilla Wafers was actually a hot link that took me to a page on the Keebler Web site. Despite RecipeBuddie's occasional confusion, Keebler—a subsidiary of Kellogg—is hoping that Becky will spread the word about its products to instant messaging users around the world.

The Cookbook

Figure 1

[click for larger image]

Sounds delicious, huh? RecipeBuddie shills for Keebler via AOL Instant Messenger.

RecipeBuddie was developed by Emedia, a six-year-old Internet marketing firm that has worked with a number of packaged goods companies, including Annie's Homegrown, Bayer, and Del Monte. Emedia has worked with Keebler since 1996, and built Keebler's original Web site in 1997. But today, its clients need more than a mere Web presence to stay in touch with Internet users.

"Five years ago, I would have said, 'We build Web sites,'" says Anna Murray, president of Emedia. That was the era of Bob sites, adds Murray: "Hey, Bob's got a site so we'd better build one too."

But by the late '90s, says Murray, "there was a greater interest in tools and programs and functions. Over the past four or five years, the industry has really changed, and we now get asked to do strategy consulting, do online advertising programs, develop email marketing campaigns, and guide search-engine optimization." Building Web sites is a small part of what the company now does. "People perceive that the [mere] activity of building a site is unrelated to return on investment."

When Murray read about ActiveBuddy in 2001, she knew she'd found an exciting vehicle to promote Keebler on the Web. ActiveBuddy was founded by Timothy Kay in 2000 with the simple goal of creating agents that would run on instant messaging networks, private corporate networks, or wireless networks (they can also be integrated into Web pages). Given Kay's background—Kay won a 1997 Oscar for pioneering work in 3-D computer graphics—it's not surprising that ActiveBuddy's agents tend to entertain as they inform.

By 2001, ActiveBuddy was ready to send its first agents into the field. "In June, we launched an interactive agent called GooglyMinotaur for Capitol Records," says Kathy Englar, director of product marketing at ActiveBuddy. The agent promoted Amnesiac, the then-new album by the band Radiohead. The Radiohead agent resided on a user's AOL Instant Messenger buddy contact list, and could recognize and answer natural language questions about the band and its album. Fans requested information about the band, tour dates, song lists, biographies, and album credits.

(The oddly named GooglyMinotaur, incidentally, took its moniker from one of the illustrated characters on the album cover. "Screen names are like URLs," explains Englar. "It's a land grab. I don't think Capitol was able to get Radiohead.")

Also in June 2001, ActiveBuddy made its SmarterChild demo publicly available. The agent responded to requests for movie showtimes, breaking news, personalized weather forecasts, reference materials, financial data, and sports information. It also played trivia, blackjack, and hangman. Over the following year, it talked to an astounding eight million unique instant messaging users—and logs showed that it had received millions of "I love you" messages from children. Or lonely adults.

By June 2002, ActiveBuddy found that SmarterChild was more popular even than the agent it had developed for New Line Cinema to promote the film Austin Powers in Goldmember. "It wasn't the right thing to have our demo be more popular than our client projects, so we took it out of service," says Englar. (It's still available via a Web site; see www.smarterchild.com.) In one year, SmarterChild had powerfully demonstrated the potential of ActiveBuddy.

The BuddyScript SDK was released the following month, and RecipeBuddie was one of the first third-party agents developed with it. Its creation allowed Murray to flex her literary muscles.

"I believe in the strength of words instead of turning the Internet into one big television commercial," says Murray, who's also a published author. But when she pitched the idea to Keebler, the corporate elves weren't convinced—many apparently hadn't left the tree factory in some time and simply didn't understand the concept of instant messaging. Murray talked them into a test in which Keebler paid for a sponsorship line in the SmarterChild system. "The little text line about a sweepstakes did a 6.5 percent clickthrough rate, and in the rollout did a 3 percent clickthrough rate." That convinced Keebler to approve an ActiveBuddy program.

The Recipe

BuddyScript is the scripting language that makes ActiveBuddy and other agents possible. The script can drive a wide range of activities, from retrieving data sales information from a database to launching an application such as a phone dialer. The unique part of BuddyScript is that it lets programmers create responses to natural language queries—that is, queries made with the user's own choice of words.

The BuddyScript SDK is a free download, available at www.buddyscript.com, that lets developers create interactive agents either for internal use—an agent might be used to answer common human resources questions, for example—or for Internet marketing and promotion. To date, more than three thousand developers have downloaded the SDK. Once they've created a script, BuddyScript Server Limited Edition allows for five hundred user sessions per month and gives developers the capacity to run demos for a $199 license fee.

The SDK includes an integrated development environment that allows developers to test their interactive agents on Windows. It features a tutorial project; libraries of reusable BuddyScript code for commonly used functions like date handling; sample applications with complete interactive agents built with the BuddyScript SDK; and BuddyScript Server Developer Edition for testing and prototyping.

Once it's ready to be deployed, there are two options: The enterprise edition has a per-seat license; the commercial edition—used for marketing projects like RecipeBuddie—is priced on a per-session basis. "The ActiveBuddy server configuration allows this thing to scale up to millions of users," says Murray.

The BuddyScript SDK provides support for a variety of messaging environments, including AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. With the BuddyScript Connectivity Service, released in October 2002, BuddyScript applications can also reach wireless messaging platforms such as WAP, email, SMS, and RIM. This means that developers can write an application once and get compatibility with cell phones, pagers, and other wireless devices in addition to the desktop.

"BuddyScript is not enormously complex, although you need to be a fairly sophisticated Java programmer to work with it," says Murray. The SDK was designed with non-engineers in mind, though Web developers adept at HTML and JavaScript will be the most comfortable using it.



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