In an age of stale, corporate Web sites, IM provides a low-cost way to promote your brand. It may not be elegant, but an IM robot can field questions on behalf of your company and address user concerns.

February 12, 2003
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/virtual-elves-keebler-im-bots/184411635

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.

The Ingredients

Murray dove into the project. "I am the mad scientist behind RecipeBuddie," she says. "This is different than a recipe database wrapped in an IM wrapper because of natural language. This is a writer's territory, and the writing of the script is fun beyond your wildest dreams. You have to anticipate all of the ways that people are going to ask questions." Take the statement "I hate onions." Someone might also write "I don't like onions," or "I abhor onions," or "No onions for me."

"Then you have to come up with an interesting variety of ways to communicate with the consumer. If someone says he doesn't like onions, you can respond, 'I understand. No onions for you. Why don't you try one of these recipes?'"

This response has three distinct parts an acknowledgement, a repetition of the customer's need, and a suggestion. And each of the parts can be said in a variety of ways. For example, an agent must recognize that "hello" is the same thing as "how the heck are you?" and "hi" and "wassup?"

In a way, scripting an agent with BuddyScript is like writing a screenplay in which there are two characters, the user and the interactive agent. The developer determines what words and phrases the agent can understand, and how it should respond.

"We made RecipeBuddie respond to things like, 'I'm sad,' to which she responds, 'How would you like some comfort food?' Or, 'I need to make dinner for my kids,' to which she responds by giving you things that are child-friendly. A recipe database can't do that, because there's nothing inherent in the recipe for a chicken pot pie that says kids are going to like it. We put a layer over top of the recipe database that is the human layer." That layer associates non-ingredient words, such as kosher or picnic, with recipes.

It took Emedia eight weeks to program RecipeBuddie under an aggressive development schedule. About two thousand pieces of dialogue were created. "The dream combination for this kind of project is a strong programmer and a strong writer. You've got words and nothing else. You have to create a strong voice," says Murray. Her team had to create a specific voice for RecipeBuddie. They started with a vaguely Emeril Lagasse-like character, then a prissier Betty Crocker type, before settling on Becky, who seemed the best fit for Keebler's demographic—women, ages twenty-five to fifty-four. "She's suburban and she's got a sense of humor," says Murray.

But women in this age range aren't the only RecipeBuddie users. Certain other demographic groups, it seems, cannot resist asking an ostensibly female bot questions that range from rudely personal to outright harassing. "I sat down with existing bots and typed in everything I could think of," says Murray, who also solicited questions from friends. This prepared Becky to understand the inevitable questions—Will you date me? How old are you? and other more personal queries—so she could politely steer users back to cookery.

The Taste Test

After overcoming the technical hurdles, Murray next had to contend with political obstacles, beginning with AOL, whose IM service is the most widely used on the Internet. AOL must give permission before outside bots can be launched on its network, because "they have to flip a switch to let an unlimited number of messages go to one screen name," says Murray. This is referred to as "provisioning the bot." The hitch is that AOL isn't making any money off the ActiveBuddy bots. To address this, AOL requires a media buy with a buddy launch—such as a RecipeBuddie promotion on AOL's AIM Today splash screen. Neither MSN nor Yahoo requires such a purchase.

"AOL has attempted to come up with their own bot-launching software," says Murray. "They obviously want to make all the money—when these bots are launched, ActiveBuddy gets paid." Still, the three major IM services have so far allowed RecipeBuddie to run on their networks.

"We're using several methods to measure the success of RecipeBuddie," says Jeff Johansen, vice president of marketing for Keebler. "They include the number of users who added RecipeBuddie to their buddy list, the number of message exchanges with RecipeBuddie, the number of recipes viewed, and the number of recipes printed. The number of users who add RecipeBuddie to their buddy list is a good indication of intent to use RecipeBuddie more than once. And we're also using a factor of the number of printed recipes to determine future purchase intent and estimated incremental offline sales. We're thrilled to report that our quarterly estimates were exceeded in the span of just a few weeks after the launch of RecipeBuddie."

RecipeBuddie launched in September 2002. Keebler says it hasn't yet crunched the numbers, but in the test that sold Keebler on the idea of RecipeBuddie, 120,000 total impressions resulted in an impressive 6.5 percent clickthrough rate from a link in ActiveBuddy to an online entry form for a contest on the Cheez-It Web site.

And previous ActiveBuddy agents, too, have generated high expectations. After the Austin Powers agent launched on June 26, 2002, it chalked up almost fifty million messages during more than two million visits in a single month. Consumers interacted with the Austin Powers bot for an average of almost eight minutes each, groovy news indeed for the marketers behind the agent. Clickthrough rates to the movie site were as high as 75 percent, clickthrough rates to Austin Powers Doritos promotional links were better than 7 percent, and more than four thousand users registered at the Doritos site within the first four days of the campaign.

"From the clickthrough numbers we're getting, the program is considered successful," says Murray, who says she learned three important things from creating RecipeBuddie. "First, we're only scratching the surface of what can be done. Users have a desire to engage with [bots] and really dig deep into them. Second, a tightly knit team needs to do it. It's a little like writing a novel. You can work with a couple of people, but you can't just open it up to six people as you're writing. Third, there are a huge number of opportunities to let people put in their own content. We're currently working on a project to let consumer affairs departments package their most commonly asked questions with answers."

As for RecipeBuddie, that falafel recipe was just what I'd been looking for, and it was time to end our chat. "Thanks for everything," I told her.

"You're welcome," she replied. "Are there any other recipes I can find for you today?" But before I could answer, she chirped, "Make your everyday occasion special with the distinctive flavor of Toasteds Crackers!"

It's a special day already.

Gordon Bass is based in upstate New York and writes about technology for numerous publications. Contact him at [email protected].

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