Thought I'd post an update to let you know what's going on behind the scenes at Zabaware.
On June 7th Hal is competing against 3 other bots in the Turing 2014 at the Royal Society in London. Video about the event is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hgw9RVwbaw I'll be traveling to London that weekend to see the competition and hopefully talk to some media that should be present.
I recently released the CereProc Katherine Voice at
https://zabaware.com/products/store/comersus_viewItem.asp?idProduct=11 It only works standalone for now. Compatibility with Hal Assistant will come at a later date with the next update of Hal. I'm also in the process of upgrading all of the AT&T voices we offer from version 4 to version 5. It will be a free update to any customer who has the older voice. Mainly compatibility updates but some minor voice quality improvements as well.
I fixed the facebook Hal app at
www.facebook.com/Zabaware this past weekend after its been offline for a while due to facebook starting to require SSL on all apps. The Hal Twitter bot is still down due to other reasons, but I hope to fix that soon when I have some spare time.
Google advertising costs for Zabaware have been steadily increasing and now almost to the point its not worth it because it will cost more than the sales it brings in. I'm looking for other ways to increase traffic and will try something different. I've owned the domain artificial-intelligence.com for a long time and never used it for much other than redirect to Zabaware. I'm going to create a web comic about AI using Zabaware characters. I've contracted out an artist and writer to do about a dozen strips. I'm going to promote it on Zabaware's facebook and twitter accounts (also by email newsletter and on the artificial-intelligence.com domain) and see if its something people share. Maybe it will help bring in traffic better than google advertising, maybe not, but I'll try the 12 strips as an experiment and see what happens. I'll post the scripts for the comics soon here to see if you guys have any input.