Clone yourself online

Stan Beer
Monday, 09 April 2007 17:19

Your IT - Home IT

Ever wanted to clone yourself so that you while you're playing your clone is hard at work? While it's still not possible to do it in the physical world, a new startup company claims they can enable people to put a cyber clone to work on the net using new smart AI technology.

MyCyberTwin, from an Australian company of the same name, is an intelligent software clone of a real person with the ability to conduct life-like conversations while its human twin is offline.

According to the company, MyCyberTwin users can easily create a personal online clone that can chat on their behalf through social networks such as MySpace, blogs, dating sites and MSN instant messaging. The technology, now in alpha, is claimed to gives bloggers a 24/7 online presence and a unique opportunity to interact with their readers no matter what time their blogs are accessed.

MyCyberTwin CEO Liesl Capper, who built the company with co-founder Dr John Zakos, said that the real business impact of MyCyberTwin would be the fact that it gives social networks defensible technology.

"The features on existing social networks can all be copied by competitors and because of this, social networks are vulnerable – they could die in a moment," Ms Capper said.

"MyCyberTwin offers a deep interactive tool for both users and advertisers, that is dead easy for users to ‘plug and play’ but is extremely hard for competitors to copy," she said.

"MyCyberTwin will allow people to put their personality online, and interact with people through software that allows people to learn about visitors to their site or blog," Ms Capper said.

According to Ms Capper, having MyCyberTwin on a social network will give that site a real point of difference to its competitors.

"Imagine a dating site where users can have their cybertwin available 24/7 to chat with potential new partners, to find the most compatible ones for them to get back to later.

"There is also huge potential for companies to have virtual sales assistants always online to answer questions about their products in a lifelike conversation with customers.

"Unlike old chat robots which took years to build, MyCyberTwins can be put together quickly and are easy to train. MyCyberTwins chat to friends or visitors to a blog, engage them and tell them things. At the same time they gather information, such as why people visit a website, what they really think about a product, or where their owner’s friends are going on the weekend."

Ms Capper said virtual worlds like Second Life, and existing corporate mascots on MySpace, are very one dimensional, "empty" experiences of the company – "with MyCyberTwin we have the capability to let these representatives really talk to people."

Despite the bold claims of MyCyberTwin, it is more than a trifle audacious to compare an unknown and untested product in the alpha stage of development to two of the most popular and fastest growing social networking phenomena to hit the web. That said, the idea of being able to clone your personality and put it to work online is intriguing.