Pandorabots SpellBinder™

Pandorabots SpellBinder™ is an in-house technology aimed at rapidly creating content for a pandorabot (a Pandorabots’ chat bot).

Overview

Pandorabots SpellBinder services for chat bot creation help you successfully augment your broad marketing and branding investments into unique interactive personal experiences. We have been helping clients by developing and deploying successful chat bot solutions aimed at achieving their marketing and branding objectives. Using our standards-based content coupled with our in-house content creation tools, we learn about your business issues and requirements to ensure that the right marketing solution is delivered according to a defined schedule and budget. We provide:

  • In-depth business needs analysis
  • Building a marketing and branding capability for your needs
  • Proof-of-concept prototype deployments
  • Project staff augmentation
  • Enterprise chat bot-based marketing and branding planning

How chat bots can help

Today, with the emergence of new digital formats and platforms, the distinctions between advertising and marketing have blurred. With Pandorabots technology, it is now possible to combine transactional objectives (i.e. with live human assistance close by) with branding objectives across new mediums, including social media, online video, mobile platforms, game-based platforms and online chat communities. Our technology permits measurable interactive marketing. Pandorabots Services and products assist companies seeking to move beyond traditional advertising by helping to create truly interactive experiences with consumers. Moreover, our products are truly multilingual - capable of interacting with consumers in the language of their choice. Companies can target specific markets and easily measure the effectiveness of interactive campaigns. Our products are truly cross platform and easily adaptable to new digital media as they emerge.

Experiments at demand-generation promotions on the web have focused on promoting recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online followed by trusted brand websites. Efforts aimed at gaining trust seem to have almost the same effect as online consumer opinions. How might we gain a trusting relationship with a consumer? Chat bots create the possibility for direct positive interaction with online consumers. Artfully crafted and entertaining chat bots create opportunities for word of mouth campaigns and segmented and targeted messages. The interactive capabilities of chat bots permits gathering of important customer feedback in the context of specific promotional messages.

Previous marketing and advertising experiments with chat bots have foundered on the technical hurdle of building robust and believable chat bots. Pandorabots SpellBinder is the first in series of product releases aimed at producing reliable, appealing and entertaining chat bots. In contrast to traditional advertising, our solutions are consumer centric [1] meaning that (1) consumers actively enjoy interactions with them, (2) they are granular - chat bots provide specific messages to specific audiences, (3) they are cross platform - meaning they may be placed almost anywhere, including games, virtual worlds, twitter and other micro-blogging platforms, instant messaging platforms, cell phones, gadgets, toys, plain old web pages and even vending machines, (4) they can be augmented to support online transactions (with sales people monitoring the chat bots) and (5) their effectiveness is easily measurable.

Industry Solutions

The true business value of an interactive marketing and branding medium emerges when it successfully promotes a brand image of an organization so that it best meets the specific needs of its industry. Changing the way organizations do business requires not only a powerful and flexible technology platform to accommodate the wide range of business requirements, challenges and goals, but also a deep understanding of the process and regulatory realities of the industries in which our clients operate. The specific solutions our clients have implemented reflect our detailed understanding of their goals and the unique requirements of their businesses.

Cross-platform (digital formats) coupled with industry-wide standards for measuring and deploying chat bots are an essential part of Pandorabots long term vision. We adhere to open standards when possible, and otherwise work to help form new standards where none currently exist. Our long-term vision includes forth-coming products that deploy interactive, measurable messages into mobile platforms, micro-blogging platforms, Instant Messaging platforms, internet, branded entertainment and custom solutions, and we believe these channels will replace traditional forms of advertising.

Our cross-platform standards-based solutions give your organization a competitive edge whenever there’s a decision to be made. They help cut costs and save time so that you can get the most out of your valuable resources. Find out how Pandorabots Services can help you.

Partner Solutions

Pandorabots specializes in content creation (chat bot knowledge), knowledge management, hosting, statistics and ongoing evolution of (maintenance) of content. Our Business Partners offer avatar development, custom voice streams, and other services that enhance the appeal of our marketing and branding technologies. Pandorabots` Business Partners combine their expertise with our content creation technology to help customers create a competitive edge, accelerate project implementation time, and improve return on investment. They are highly skilled and have made an investment in the business so they can meet your requirements.

Services

Pandorabots SpellBinder and related services (knowledge management, hosting, statistics, and content evolution) help you maximize the return on your existing marketing investments. Interactive capabilities can easily be added to existing marketing materials. Throughout the life cycle of your pandorabot development, our experts guide, mentor and support your efforts. We help you meet your business requirements so that you can achieve maximum value on your investment. Whether you are deploying your first pandorabot application, running a collection of pandorabots in a large system in production or simply engaged in early research our service offerings can:

  • Deliver a business solution that addresses your changing needs
  • Help ensure that your system performs optimally
  • Assist you with future expansion and enhancement of your pandorabot deployments

Using Pandorabots SpellBinder to author your promotional messages

Previously a big hurdle to wide-spread adoption of pandorabot technology has been the time to author a believable entertaining pandorabot. Our patent-pending Pandorabots SpellBinder service reduces the time to author an effective chat bot. In essence, we create a chat bot, at first only knowing content specific to your business, and later integrate it with a chat bot with extensive popular generic content. Clients interacting with the result experience robust conversations and positive feelings. Chat bots authored with the help of Pandorabots SpellBinder understand both your specific business domain of knowledge and unobtrusively handle questions outside of your business domain.

How long someone willingly engages with your pandorabot determines its quality. Creating a robust - meaning able to answer a variety of questions - and entertaining pandorabot that leaves a positive impression are what we are after. Crafting business specific informational and entertaining messages are the essential function of any marketing and sales organization. And the impression your authored pandorabot induces within clients depends heavily on accurate information you provide us with. Pandorabots SpellBinder uses your messages to create a believable and entertaining artificial entity.

What kinds of problems occur with chat bots?

Entertainment chat bots are quite different from informational chat bots. Informational chat bots able to replace Frequently Asked Question (FAQs) are notoriously difficult to author and few have been successfully deployed. Successfully imagining all of the possible inquiries (including those with mis-spellings) takes a real investment in time. Pandorabots SpellBinder was developed to create entertaining chat bots, and we have little experience using our technology to create robust informational chat bots. While in principal it is possible to use this technology to develop a robust informational chat bot substantially more time must be invested to realize robust results. Unless someone (a sales person) monitors conversations between chat bots and consumers on a full-time basis - with expert human content replacing the chat bot content in response to purely informational inquiries, we suggest you exercise caution attempting to provide robust answers to fact-based queries. The short-term solution to this problem: your chat bot entertains but avoids offering much substantial information, instead it notifies a human, in essence, asking for human intervention when the customer seeks substantive information.

So what are the next steps?

We are going to create a pandorabot using transcripts between your audience and your organization. How do we obtain these transcripts? Sources include:

  • transcripts of TV shows, commercials and movies
  • transcribed interviews with real persons or persons playing the role of a character
  • stored transcripts of instant messenger logs
  • recordings of special events such as Moon Landings

The more data we obtain, the better the resulting pandorabot. Best results are obtained with at least 6000 separate sentences.

Our service involves processing these transcripts to produce the first draft pandorabot. Most of the work has now been done, but clean up work remains. We recommend you designate someone on your staff to take responsibility for maintaining the pandorabot. We will work with your staff to fix any remaining inconsistencies before the pandorabot is deployed in a real setting. We recommend that the initial deployment take place in company controlled focus groups so as the measure the effectiveness of the marketing messages.

On Going Maintenance

Website pages change, chat bot answers change, every marketing message tends to evolve over time, if only to enhance its affect. We train your staff to examine conversation logs, and use the continual stream of queries to adapt the responses to ensure positive impressions.

Premium Support

Pandorabots premium support for Pandorabots SpellBinder offers expert, comprehensive, proactive, and personalized software support and assistance to help improve the promotional messages and entertainment of your pandorabot branding efforts. Premium support services complement your software maintenance contract with added levels of support often necessary for organizations with complex branding strategies. Pandorabots Premium Services can include:

  • Premium Support Manager
  • Premium Support Analyst
  • Operations support
  • Developer support
  • Applications support
  • On-site emergency support

How much does it cost?

Contact info@pandorabots.com for more information. Or call 510 393 3948 during the hours of 8am-5pm PST.

More about Pandorabots

Pandorabots was recently 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 but rapidly growing company with a very strong technology portfolio. With more than 800 million interactions, our public consumer-oriented (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. Pandorabots seeks business partners with complementary skill sets coupled with a compatible vision for the future.

How SpellBinder works

People often ask us how SpellBinder actually works. Our patent provides the actual technical description which may be unsatisfactory unless you are well-steeped in the intricacies of interpreters, programming languages and computer science graph traversal algorithms. So here is a layman’s description: Suppose we want to create the Star Trek character Captain Kirk as a pandorabot. And suppose we have a transcript of conversations between Kirk and other people. Let’s start with an imperfect analogy between an untrained bot and a child, and imagine how a child might learn to mimic Kirk. We start with a child as a kind of tabula rasa.

So how might we train a child to become Kirk from transcripts? We begin by exposing our child to each of the sentences uttered by others to Kirk. We know our child has the inherent ability to recognize sentences with equivalent meaning. For example, there are many different ways someone might ask “What is your name?”. Here are two such examples: “May I know your name?” or “Identify yourself”. Learning all of the different ways to ask this question takes time - the child must be exposed to examples to learn the different ways. If you don’t believe this, just consider asking someone their name using an unknown foreign language, and you can immediately understand that although humans recognize language patterns quickly, it takes time and exposure to learn these examples. Spellbinder does this much faster! SpellBinder can even be adapted to recognize multiple foreign languages!

Continuing with our example: as the next step, we teach our child to mimic Kirk’s response for each of the sentences uttered to Kirk by others. And we are totally dependent on our child’s ability to distinguish between collections of sentences that share the same meaning (e.g. the collection of sentences that mean the same as “What is your name”). And it takes the child a long time to do this. SpellBinder does this much much faster.

A child may encounter sentences for which they lack an adequate response. The child may choose to ignore these sentences or simply respond with something equivalent to “I don’t know”. As adults interacting with children, we often want more specific responses. And as bot authors, we are aware that should our bot produce such non-responses, people would find our bot less appealing. SpellBinder takes on this challenge by providing acceptable default responses. Consider the sentences which could be understood as meaning “I love X”. If a child hears an adult say, “I love ice cream” and a response, “I can take it or leave it”, then the child can re-use the same response for an infinite number of variations like “I love baseball”, “I love California”, “I love going to the Opera” and so on. The takeaway point: SpellBinder incorporates many of the basic patterns a child learns far more slowly. SpellBinder generates bots with responses to those patterns, and moreover the bots are able to reuse the responses in novel ways.

Our analogy is imperfect. No one really understands how children actually learn language. Many people observe that how humans acquire language is remarkable and suggest further study might lead to improvements in bot training techniques. What if we could capture the knowledge of a very old person who has a combination of wonderful linguistic skills and wide experience with a variety of languages? What if we could somehow embed this into the child and bypass the normal learning process? In effect, this is how SpellBinder works.

Pandorabots already offers Pandorawriter - a tool capable of reading transcripts and generating AIML suitable for recognizing specific sentences and responding with specific answers. Pandorawriter evolved out of a need to rapidly add simple AIML to an existing pandorabot. Used alone, and not in combination with an existing Pandorabot, it will produce a pandorabot that can only respond to the specific sentences it was taught.

SpellBinder goes well beyond Pandorawriter. SpellBinder teaches a pandorabot language patterns and responses (such as the example “I love X” mentioned above). With SpellBinder you can rapidly develop robust conversational pandorabots for specific application domains.

References and Footnotes

[1]

For more details please see page 7 of “Beyond advertising - Choosing a strategic path to the digital consumer” By Saul Berman, Bill Battino, and Karen Feldman

http://www-05.ibm.com/de/media/downloads/beyond-advertising.pdf

© Copyright Pandorabots Incorporated 2009

Pandorabots, Inc.
5940 College Ave
Oakland, CA 94618
U.S.A.
Produced in the United States of America
October 2009
All Rights Reserved

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