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Welcome to Pandorabots!
Pandorabots is a free open-source-based community webservice enabling you to develop and publish chatbots on the web (Read more details here).
Pandorabots is the largest chatbot community on the internet. 162,000 registered bot masters have chosen to create more than 201,000 pandorabots ("chatbots") in multiple languages. Through February 2012, over 1.4 billion conversational interactions have occurred between clients and pandorabots, and this number increases rapidly (it can be seen near the top of the center of the Pandorabots home page). Pandorabots are used all over the web - enter the string "talk?botid=" into a Google search box to get the latest number of links.
Pandorabots have been adapted to nearly every ecological niche on the internet. Pandorabots appear on web pages, in instant messaging, and respond to email and forum posts. They can be found in Second Life, in online games, and in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Increasingly pandorabots are turning up in mobile applications and texting. Pandorabots support marketing and advertising and are used in education.
Pandorabots is under constant development and has a very large active community. Pandorabots adheres to open standards for chatbot publishing. To the extent possible Pandorabots itself has been constructed from open-source software.
From any browser, you may create, design and publish your own software robots – and make them available to anyone via the Internet. Sign-up for an Account to begin creating your own virtual robots. If you already have an account, please sign-in to the left with your email address and password.
Pandorabots offers both Free and Premium Services. To see all the options, please look at our Service Comparison Table.
What's New?
- [April 22, 2012] Pandorabots CallMomTM Mobile Virtual Assistant
Pandorabots is pleased to announce the release of our new CallMom app for Android. CallMom is a mobile, voice-activated personal assistant that can have a conversation, dial a number, send an email or SMS message, learn contacts, provide help with the app, search the web, open a URL in a browser, read data from web services, check battery status, give directions and find a location on the map -- all through natural langauge, voice commands.
Unlike other virtual assistant apps for Android and iPhone, CallMom includes a learning feature so that it can learn your personal preferences and contacts, and be taught to correct speech recognition errors. CallMom can be connected to a variety of pandorabot personalities, including ALICE, Mitsuku, Zoe, Fake Captain Kirk and others.
The CallMom app utilizes Pandorabots to respond to natural langauge inputs. The knowledge content is written in AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) and the responses are completely customizable. In what represents the first major extension to the AIML language in years, we've created a set of AIML tags called "Out of Band" (OOB) tags to process device actions.
Also unlike other virtual assistant apps, we've made the CallMom knowledge base completely open source. Hosted on a Google Code project, the CallMom AIML is freely available to anyone wishing to create his own custom CallMom personality. We've already attracted a significant body of contributions to this resource from our AIML development community.
CallMom is now available free in the Android Market, with limited learning features. A premium upgrade is underway which will make the learned knowledge persistent.
- [March 21, 2012] Pandorabots for Mobile App Developers
If you are developing a mobile app for Android, iPhone, or other mobile OS, or if you are building a proxy service for mobile apps, and you are trying to connect your app to Pandorabots, please follow these steps:
- Create an account on the Free Community Server (at www.pandorabots.com). You can create an account on our free server www.pandorabots.com to develop and test your pandorabot, but when it goes “live” you will quickly use up too much of the Free Community Server resources. So when you are ready to go live, please sign up for the Shared Hosting Service and we will move your pandorabot to the shared hosting server.
- Create a pandorabot - After creating your account, follow the easy steps (find more details here) to create your own pandorabot(s). This can be as simple as cloning one of the free pandorabots we make available to you. When you publish your pandorabot, it will be assigned a unique bot id. You can connect your app to your pandorabot through the XML-RPC connection using your unique bot id. You will provide this pandorabot to customers of your application or service.
If you are using the Free Community Server to host your pandorabot and it reaches its resource limit, the pandorabot’s response will be changed to a message indicating that it is using too many resources on the Free Community Server. If your app begins to receive this message, please follow the above steps to create a bot on a Shared Hosting server.
- [January 10, 2012]
Chatbots 3.2 Conference Philadelphia March 31, 2012
This year marks the third annual Chatbots 3.x conference to be held in Philadelphia on March 31, 2012. Building upon the success of Chatbots 3.0 and 3.1 and our earlier Colloquia on Conversational Systems, the Chatbots 3.2 conference brings together leaders in the chatbot field. Our speakers will present on a variety of topics in technology, law, business and research.
The Chatbots 3.x conference has become the premier conference for chatbots, virtual assitants, and artificial intelligence avatars. This year promises to be an exciting year because of all the developments in mobile apps. Following the successful launch of Apple Siri in 2011, a number of projects are underway to develop alternative mobile A.I. assistants. Several of the presentations will describe these latest developments in mobile chatbot technology.
Our co-host Francis Taney Esq. will once again give an "Ask the Lawyer" presentation. Those interested in submitting their questions are welcome to contact us (info@pandorabots.com) in advance, and we will forward them to Mr. Taney. This is a great opportunity to ask questions about business law, intellectual property issues, and the State, U.S. and International laws and regulations that affect the chatbot industry.
As in previous years, the conference presentations will be videotaped and distributed on our Aimlinstructor Youtube channel.
There will be an all-conference dinner on Saturday night in Philadelphia.
Register before March 1 and take advtage of Early Registration for $100. http://chatbots32.eventbrite.com/
- [October 26, 2011]
Pandorabots under heavy load from mobile apps
Apple introduced Siri recently, and many developers are developing and deploying phone apps based on Pandorabots. We are currently making some configuration changes to improve performance. Meanwhile, if you are active in a chat bot forum, blog, or community, please help spread the word about the following information.
If you are developing a phone-based app, please contact us at info@pandorabots so that we may explain our other service options. If you see your name near the top of this list (http://pandorabots.com/botmaster/en/mostactive), you should be contacting us. We have difficulty hosting very high traffic pandorabots on the Free Community Server. Wildly popular mobile apps using the Pandorabots free server (www.pandorabots.com) take resources away from many other botmasters and developers, who experience a service degradation.
Because of resource constraints on the Free Community Server we intend to move popular pandorabots onto our subscription services (see http://bandore.pandorabots.com/subscription/ServiceComparison/index.html).
One difficulty faced by the mobile developers is that their apps are “hard-wired” to specific bot ids on the Free Community Server. Because of the obstacles of the approval process required to push modified apps to the iPhone app store or Android Market, the transition to a different Pandorabots server takes time. A download app connected to a specific botid is quite likely to immediately fail, so the app developers must offer an upgrade to a new version when the transition is made.
We have real problems contacting some of our users. This is especially true for some of the pandorabots in the current “most popular list”. Pandorabots makes no attempt to verify the identities of people signing up for the free server. Unfortunately sometimes people use bogus email addresses for user ids, or in other cases botmasters lose access to their email addresses, and we are unable to contact them through the provided credentials. For this reason we are making this announcement to the broader community in the hopes that any botmasters we cannot reach will contact us.
- [September 19, 2011]
For some time we’ve been grappling with an issue involving the potential misuse of pandorabot content supplied by authors. And more recently, it has come to our attention that people developing chatbot-based phone apps are using other author’s chatbot’s content. Access to the content is achieved through accessing the pandorabot’s published XML-RPC connection (or in some cases by screen-scraping HTML pages--though we discourage this technique). In some cases these are unauthorized and unwelcome accesses.
- [September 5, 2011]
The Pandorabots free community server at www.pandorabots.com experienced unexpected downtime yesterday, September 4, for about 14 hours. Although we have not completely ruled out a hacking attack as the cause of the outage, our engineers speculate the problem might have arisen from a Linux kernel bug. We are sorry for the downtime.
- [July 27, 2011]
AIML Superbot Special Offer - Free Consulting
The AIML Superbot is a blank template that helps you create a custom chat bot from scratch. If you want to create a bot with its own proprietary, unique personality, the Superbot helps you by providing a rich set of patterns that allow you to "fill in the blanks" with your own bot responses.
Building a bot from scratch can still be a daunting task for those new to AIML and chat bot creation. That is why we are now offering 2 hours of free consulting time with your Superbot purchase. You will be able to talk directly by phone or Skype with Dr. Richard S. Wallace or another AIML expert and receive support and help with your bot project.
Use your consultation time to get specific answers to all your questions about bot content creation and help with your project, including help linking the bot to speech recognition systems, avatars, speech synthesis and other third-party applications.
This offer expires on October 1, 2011
- [June 3, 2011]
Pandorabots Service Comparison Table
Have you heard about Pandorabots premium subscription hosting services?
This free server at www.pandorabots.com is home to hundreds of thousands of pandorabots. If you require more dedicated resources for your project, Pandorabots also provides some alternatives. Have a look at our Service Comparison Table to see if one of our subscription services fits the needs of your project.
In addition to this free community service, Pandorabots offers a Shared Service for 75 USD per month, for up to 50,000 conversational interactions per day. A Dedicated Service is available for unlimited interactions. We provide a detailed comparison of the options here: Pandorabots Web Services Comparison Table
- [May 23, 2011]
Updated Policy Guidelines for Free Community Server
1. Resource usage
Pandorabots provides a (free) Community Server at www.pandorabots.com. This server is intended for botmasters to experiment with new AIML bots that use limited resources. The Community Server is home to more than 200,000 bots created by more than 150,000 botmasters. Pandorabots has served more than 1.2 billion interactions. Please remember you are sharing resources with all these pandorabots and their botmasters.
If the Community Server resource limitations are inadequate, please contact Pandorabots at info@pandorabots.com to learn about our other alternatives.
In any event Pandorabots reserves the right to remove, modify or disable a pandorabot on the Community Server when we deem that the pandorabot misuses the Community Server resources. The types of issues that may lead to intervention by Pandorabots include (but are not limited to) to these circumstances:
- Use of automated scripts to make your pandorabot talk to itself or another bot or script.
- The number of daily interactions exceeds 50,000 (Game Developers and others - please contact us at info@pandorabots for other arrangements supporting highly interactive pandorabots).
- The number of pandorabots created in your account exceeds 20.
- The amount of AIML in your pandorabot(s) exceeds 100,000 categories.
- The number of bot properties exceeds 200.
- In any situation where Pandorabots determines that your pandorabots are using too many resources on the free Community Server.
If you need more resources, please contact info@pandorabots.com.
2. Types of pandorabots
For a description of the types of pandorabots allowed on the Community Server, see
. - [January, 2011]
Using HTML5 Speech Recognition with Pandorabots
We found an interesting and simple demo of speech recognition in HTML5 in this presentation on slide 25. To make the demo work with ALICE and Pandorabots, we had to make only a slight change to our custom HTML input files.
Here is a demo of the Fake Captain Kirk bot using speech recognition: Talking Animated Fake Kirk with Voice Input.
Note: The demo uses the Google Speech API. At the time of this writing, not all browsers yet support this attribute. We have found it works in Google Chrome. Furthermore, we have only tested it successfully with Windows 7.
The only change to the custom HTML was to replace
<input type="text" size="60" name="input"/>
with
<input type="text" size="60" name="input" x-webkit-speech />
There are a couple of "tricks" you need to know to test the speech API:
- 1. Click on the little mic icon to begin speaking. The speech API will detect when you have finished speaking and, when it has finished processing, will display the text it detected in the text area.
- 2. If you are satisfied with what the speech API detected, click the "Send" button to transmit it to the bot.
The quality of the speech recognition may not seem very high. There are a number of factors that affect the accuracy of speech recognition: the quality of the microphone, background noise, the accent of the speaker, the type of sound card on your computer and so on. Pandorabots has no control over the Google voice recognition software, but the results should be comparable to using the Google voice API with any other application.
Enabling Chrome Voice API
The Chrome voice recognition API may not be enabled by default. Follow these steps to create a shortcut to Chrome with voice recognition enabled.
- Create a desktop shortcut to Google chrome with copy and paste. (You may also want to rename this shortcut something like "Chrome Voice").
- Right click on the shortcut and select "Properties"
- On the Shortcut tab, modify the Target field to include the flag "--enable-speech-input". For example if the Target was originally
C:\Users\drwallace\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
change it to
C:\Users\drwallace\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --enable-speech-input
- Click OK and use this Chrome Voice shortcut to enable speech recognition.