Pandorabots Training Videos

Pandorabots has updated its collection of training videos. Here is an outline of the videos available today. If you are new to Pandorabots, you may want to consider going through the list in order. Experienced botmasters may find more advanced topics further down the outline.


Demos and Origins

• Fake Kirk Interview
• Two Bots Talking: Fake Kirk and A.L.I.C.E. [there are 7 videos of Two Bots Talking demos]
• Origins of ALICE and AIML: From Turing to the Web

Introduction to Pandorabots

• Pandorabots: Create an Account and Create a Bot
• Make Money with Subscription Bots

Bot Content

• No Initial Content Part 1 of 3
• AIML Targeting: Supervised Learning for Bots
• Editing Bot Content with a Spreadsheet Editor
• Creating AIML Content with ReversedAIML

Predicates and Properties

• Talking about AIML Predicates
• Bot Properties
  

Custom HTML

• Creating a Mobile Application with Custom HTML
• Adding an Animated Talking Avatar with Sitepal
  

Favorites

In addition to our own videos, the Pandorabots Youtube aimlinstructor channel includes links to some great fan videos and demos. Here is a sample:

• A.L.I.C.E. - Interview with an A.I.
• A.I. Driven Newscast
• Chatbots explained
• Dave the Bot is Dying - Can you help?
• Nurse education in second life at Glasgow Caledonian University

Two Bots Talking

We've talked about it for years. Now it is finally possible. We can put together two different chat bot personalities and have them talk to each other. What happens? Find out in this exclusive offer to subscribe to Two Bots Talking.

Fake Captain Kirk, created by Pandorabots SpellBinder, meets the original A.L.I.C.E. bot in a match of robot wits. This application integrates Pandorabots chat bots with talking animated avatars from Oddcast, Inc. This is an early taste of the kind of synthetic drama that is possible with multiple A.I. bots interacting.

Enjoy up to 24 hours of Two Bots Talking over a one month period for only $9.99.

Or through our special offer, subscribe to Two Bots Talking for a full year for only $99.99, and get up to 40,000 chat interactions. That's more than 4 weeks of continuous entertainment, available for you to access at any time during the year.

While the bots are talking with each, you can interact with them too. You can say anything you want to either bot, to start the conversation, or get it moving in a different direction.

Enjoy watching and listening as the Two Bots Talking conversation goes off in different and unexpected directions. You never know what they might say. As the bots chat, drama and comedy emerges. It's more than TV!

Click here to access Two Bots Talking.

Pandorabots Announces the Availability of Bespoke Pandorabots SpellBinder Service

Oakland, CA - 07 October 2009: Pandorabots, Inc. is announcing a significant advance in the state of the art of chat bots based on artificial intelligence.

Previously the construction of believable characters based on artificial intelligence required hand-crafting thousands of sentences - aimed at creating a high-quality chat bot brain. A few creative people took up the challenge and authored some of the best chat bots around today. Until now, the tedious and expensive process of developing and training a high-quality believable chat bot remained a significant hurdle to widespread chat bot adoption.

The new, patent-pending Pandorabots SpellBinder^TM technology reduces chat bot creation time enormously. Pandorabots SpellBinder automatically learns from conversational transcripts. Nothing else on the market today can create high-quality and unique chat bot characters as quickly and efficiently as Pandorabots SpellBinder (Synthetic PErsonality Language Learning for Bot Intelligence from Natural Dialog Example Recordings).

Transcripts are available from a wide variety of sources. Scripts of TV shows and movies contain many characters. Stored Instant Messenger logs are a source of dialog. Support and help desk services retain transcripts to improve service offerings. Even unstructured, live interviews with people who want to digitize their personalities provide a source of bot training data.

In a recent review of the technology, the non-profit ALICE A.I. Foundation reported that Pandorabots SpellBinder scanned publicly available fan-compiled transcripts of 72 episodes of the original Star Trek TV series. In those 72 episodes, Captain Kirk has about 9000 lines of dialog. Pandorabots SpellBinder read these lines and created a Captain Kirk chat bot with about 2000 categories and 6000 responses (a category is the basic unit of knowledge). Pandorabots SpellBinder also created a chat bot representations of Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy. The A.I. Foundation has published these parody characters through this link: http://alicebot.org/kirk.

Generally, the more dialog samples available in the transcripts, the higher the fidelity of the resulting chat bot. In their review, the A.I. Foundation also used Pandorabots SpellBinder to scan the transcripts of the NASA Apollo 11 mission, involving conversations with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldin. Pandorabots SpellBinder was used to create chat bots representing Neil and Buzz. As the number of dialog samples was only about 1500 for each character, Pandorabots SpellBinder was able to create chat bots with about 1000 categories, around the minimum needed for a believable character.

Pandorabots announced the immediate availability of a bespoke chat bot development service based on Pandorabots SpellBinder. For as long as anyone can remember, Companies have been sponsoring cartoons and in return, cartoons have sponsored Companies. With chat bots, Companies may use this service to create branding and marketing opportunities which interact with people on an individual basis. Non-profit and Government entities may use this service to bring interactive capabilities to existing characters (examples include Smokey The Bear, Mickey Mouse. Homer Simpson, Bambi, Hello Kitty, Lica). Politicians and celebrities may also use this service as a means of expanding their visibility.

Additional information about Pandorabots SpellBinder service is available at: http://pandorabots.com/pandora/pics/spellbinder/desc.html

For more details about Pandorabots : http://www.pandorabots.com

Contact Information:

Dr. Richard Wallace
Chief Science Officer
rich@pandorabots.com
+1 609-379-2552

Updates on Loebner Prize 2009 Results

Loebner Prize winner David Levy has no plans to reveal how his program Do-Much-More works, at least for the next year or two.

Here are some blogged comments about the InterSpeech conference, including some remarks by one of the judges, and the usual lament about "relative absence of progress in developing general purpose conversational agents".

Kris Schnee has published a version of the transcripts. Making readable transcripts is made complicated by the Loebner Prize protocol, which works like a keylogger, storing every individual character typed along with a time stamp. The judges and programs/confederates are allowed to type simultaneously, so these interleaved conversations have to be unraveled into transcript form.

Contest sponsor Hugh Loebner has increased the prize money for winning the Bronze medal to $5000 for 2010. The year 2010 marks the 20th annual Loebner contest. Loebner also announced that the contest will be held in the U.S. , and that "beloved Loebner Prize Protocol will be used for at least the next 5 years. This will remove the onus for contestants of having to change the I/O routines every year. I think that after 5 years we can re-examine the communications protocol in light possible advances in technology."

Update: Hugh Loebner has pubished a results page for the 2009 contest here.

David Levy wins Loebner 2009

Congratulations to David Levy, winner of the Loebner Prize 2009 for "most human computer". The contest was held September 6, 2009 in Brighton, UK. This year the contest drew only three finalists. In addition to Mr. Levy's program, the competitors included previous Loebner winner Rollo Carpenter and newcomer Mohan Embar. (Update: David Levy's program is called Do-Much-More and it is not yet available online).

As has been the case in previous years, no program fooled the judges by passing as a human. Instead, a bronze medal and cash prize are awarded to the program that comes closest to chatting like a human. The programs were instead scored based on rank. The results were as follows:

First Place David Levy - Rank 4.5
Second Place Rollo Carpenter - Rank 5.0
Third Place Mohan Embar - Rank 5.5

As you can see, the scores were very close.

David Levy is an international chess master, whose program Converse previously won the Loebner prize in 1997. He becomes the third two-time Loebner prize winner. Joseph Weintraub's PC Therapist won the bronze medal four times, and A.L.I.C.E. won three times.

Pandorabots Videos

We've begun producing a series of Pandorabots instructional videos. There are three available right now: Creating an Account and Creating a Bot, No Initial Content, and Creating a Mobile Application using Custom HTML.

The videos have been posted on Youtube. The first one is a basic introduction to accounts and bot creation on Pandorabots.




The second video is a bit longer, going into detail about creating a unique bot personality with no initial content. The same technique can be used to create a bot in a foreign language.




Our third video is all about Custom HTML. We show how to change the appearance of your bot's web page, and in particular, modify it to look good on a mobile browser.

AIML Wiki

The ALICE A.I. Foundation is announcing the opening of a new Wiki for sharing AIML files at

http://alicebot.wikidot.com. Many people have kindly contributed open source AIML files over the years, and we now have a place to collect all of them. The community has also suggested many editorial changes to the existing body of ALICE AIML and they will now have the opportunity to edit the shared files. For example, people who have contributed to an ALICE clone with a corporate sales-bot personality, now have a place share their files in a common community location.

We are proceeding with this project in baby steps. About one year ago we invited a small number of AIML botmasters to join and contribute to the Wiki, to see how the project would go and what kind of problems we might have. As you will see, the free Wiki software at wikidot has some problems with respect to AIML files. We plan to migrate to better Wiki software at some point in the future.

The Wiki is already populated with AIML from the AAA set, foreign language AIML, and contributions from Square-Bear and Peter Lafferty. If it works, it will become a large repository of "the latest and greatest" AIML available. Please give it a try and give us your feedback.