Wildfire is an intelligent, virtual personal assistant, accessed via your phone, using the latest speech recognition technology. She'll store up to 150 contacts, take messages, make calls, let you know if other calls are waiting, send and receive faxes and respond efficiently to spoken requests.

The Third International Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA2001) will be held on September 10-11, 2001 in Madrid, Spain.
IVA2001 aims to bring the intelligent agents communities together to discuss the current state-of-the-art in virtual agents, and to create a roadmap for the future of this technology.
The workshop will be around applications of intelligent virtual agents, virtual agent sensors, control architectures for autonomous virtual agents, etc.

This paper proposes a reference model to identify, classify and evaluate mobile agent systems having a significant set of non-trivial architectural issues and technical and functional features in order to support agent-based applications. The proposed reference model describes a generic and global architecture and identifies a set of technical and functional features. The items analysed include the following: execution, management of agent types, management identifiers, persistence, navigation, communication, interaction with external resources, and security.

Sony has released a new AIBO series: LATTE & MACARON. They are the latest AIBO Entertainment Robots with the ability to communicate with their four senses touch, sight, hearing and balance. They have also six emotions: joy, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and discontent. If you talk near LATTE or MACARON, it may start to imitate you in its own original voice.
These new companions will be available on September 23 in Japon for 824USD.

Tracerlock, the online monitoring service, has acquired another monitoring business, The Informant. The current businesses of TracerLock and The Informant, which include the monitoring of newly published material for content matching users' search terms, will be merged to make one of the web's largest monitoring services. The merged businesses will do business under the name 'TracerLock'.
TracerLock's core clipping service allows users to monitor hundreds of online news sources, and to be notified within as little as 15 minutes of a new article being published that matches one of their stored search terms.