The Pandorabots Story

Background

Pandorabots operates a free website used to build and deploy virtual personalities - in the form of human-like chatbots. The Pandorabots website originally arose out of a vision of using open-source standards supporting the development and deployment of artificially intelligent chatbots.

The open source Alice chatbot is famous for its multiple implementations, but as simple as it is, barriers to chatbot development and publishing are still fairly high and technical. Enter Pandorabots, providing an implementation of Alice, and a platform for the development and deployment of chatbots that is hosted and completely maintained. Thousands of people every day are interacting daily with published pandorabots hosted on the Pandorobats.com service.

You may create a free account on the Pandorabots website and use it to create a chatbot based on wildly popular Alice chatbot (or create a pandorabot entirely from scratch), and publish it on the website. In the same manner that the Wordpress website allows people to freely publish blogs, the Pandorabots website allows people to freely develop and publish bots.

We created Pandorabots so that anyone can easily create and publish a chatbot with a minimum of knowledge. Pandorabots is under active development, and we read our e-mail - please send your requests and comments to info@pandorabots.com.

We are strong believers in Open Source and the large parts of our work is available under licenses like the GPL.

Inception

The Pandorabots website arose out of a chance meeting between Dr. Richard Wallace and Franz Inc. staff members in late 2001 at a Linux trade show. As part of the non-profit Alice AI Foundation (www.alicebot.org) Dr. Wallace was demonstrating the Alice chatbot, and promoting a proposal for a new standard for creating chatbots - the AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language). Since the world’s first known chatbot Eliza was widely implemented in the Lisp programming language, Franz staff wanted to create a marketing demonstration showing how Lisp could be easily used to create a sophisticated multi-user website application. And one idea under consideration was to build an Eliza site. Since Alice was far more developed than Eliza, Franz decided to create a chatbot development and hosting web-based application using Alice. And thus the Pandorabots website was born.

Pandorabots Formation

The story so far describes Pandorabots as a Franz, Inc. marketing experiment. Pandorabots growth surprised everyone. Developing and publishing bots using a web-based platform based on open-standards is just easier and far more cost-effective than hosting your implementation of AIML. Website owners can easily add pandorabots to their sites. Virtual World (Second Life) users interact with pandorabots daily. Pandorabots are easily transferred to other applications (cell phones, iphones, kiosks, etc.). As Franz was primarily focused on supporting Lisp compilers and semantic databases, Pandorabots spun out of Franz in 2008 (See Pandorabots, Inc. Acquires Chatbot Technology from Franz Inc.).

More about Pandorabots

Pandorabots was founded by people with strong technology and business backgrounds who recognized the potential for developing chat bots (pandorabots) to create lasting positive impressions in the minds of consumers. We are a small growing company with a very strong technology portfolio. With more than 1.2 billion interactions, our public Community Server (and open-source standards-based) chat bot site (www.pandorabots.com) dwarfs all other competitors sites combined. While our current products retain our technical focus, our future plans include substantial investments aimed at enhancing our marketing and entertainment offerings. We are also deploying our technology on a variety of other devices (mobile phones, smart phones, TVs and other consumer products). Pandorabots seeks business partners with complementary skill sets coupled with a compatible vision for the future.

Usage Statistics

In 2013, Pandorabots had logged over 1.7 billion interactions with customers and hosted well over 220,000 bots. Our chatbots are everywhere - enter the string “talk?botid=” into a google search box to get the approximate latest number known to google.