Sensory, an artificial intelligence (AI) technology company, is bringing chatbots to consumer electronics through new additions to its TrulyNatural line of embedded natural language speech recognition engines.

TrulyNatural was augmented with a chatbot engine which can be used for dialogue management and scripting, as well as talking avatar technology to enable accurate avatar movements such as lip-synchronisation.

The company explained the additions will help developers create apps with a voice driven interface which offer “a more conversational style” and take advantage of embedded text-to-speech to drive an avatar interface.

Todd Mozer, founder and CEO of Sensory, explained to Mobile World Live voice and talking avatars can be the new interface for apps.

For instance, he said Starbucks announced a voice-centric app users can talk to, but with Sensory’s new technology the app could also have an avatar and: “a chatbot that actually helps you correct errors by asking things like “what size?” If you leave that off your order”.

“It can apply to almost any app from banking, to enterprise, even gaming could use this sort of technology,” he added.