Exploration into the use of Pandorabots

What is a Pandorabot ?

A Pandorabot is a scripted Second Life object that responds to local chat, greets new arrivals, and can be used to deliver notecards and landmarks. Depending on the phrase, a Pandorabot will query Wikipedia for an appropriate response, use its AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) programmed context sensitive artificial intelligence, check your spelling using Yahoo's spellcheck API, or send an email to any specified email address. Pandorabots can also be used to greet new arrivals and send notecards and landmarks, as well as answer questions. This may be very useful in my project with the International Office, it may enable emails to be sent to perspective learners asking if they are interested in specific course information.

Pandorabots can be on hand to greet and inform or entertain guests on your parcel even when you are offline. A properly customized Pandorabot can act effectively as a personal or business assistant, directing and informing your visitors to products, services, or personal whereabouts. Once deployed a Pandorabot is not a static feature of the parcel but continues to evolve as responses to additional matching words, phrases, questions, and comments
are programmed or learned.

The Pandorabot is the only chat bot in Second Life that supports multiple bot deployment. That is, you can place two or more Pandorabots in your store (e.g. each responding to queries for a particular product or service) and they will ignore each other avoiding the infinite chat loop other chat bots enter. Pandorabots can also be used to check spelling, deliver notecards/landmarks, or greet new arrivals.

Pandorabots are available in female and male human form, wearable parrot or bear, rotating head with the face of Bob Dobbs & Steven Colbert, or a 3D sculpted perched parrot. Pandorabot V3 can also be configured to speak using either male or female speech synthesis.

Changing A Pandorabot's Look

Pandorabots are available in a wide variety of preconfigured appearances. These include a female in business attire, male, female club go-er, parrot, bear, rotating head, and 3D sculpted parrot (wearable or perched). Most include a dialog menu option allowing the owner to easily and quickly select one of the preconfigured Pandorabot appearances. Simply click your active Pandorabot and select "Gender" from the dialog menu. You can always return to the factory default (plus any Configuration notecard changes you have made) by either clicking "Reset" in the dialog menu or "Tools -> Reset scripts in selection" from the viewer menu.

It is also possible to add custom textures to the Pandorabot. Create the texture you wish to use, drop it in your Pandorabot object's Contents, and add a line to the top of the Configuration notecard:

TEXTURE = name_of_your_texture

When changing the default Pandorabot texture you may also wish to change the default Pandorabot name to suit your new texture. To do so, edit the Configuration notecard adding lines at the top:

FIRST_NAME = Your_New_Pandorabot_First_Name

LAST_NAME = Your_New_Pandorabot_Last_Name

If you are using Pandorabot V3 or later you may also wish to change the default voice. To do so, edit the Configuration notecard:

VOICE = male

VOICE = female

VOICE = none

Finally, it is possible to move the Pandorabot's contents to any object for which you have modify rights. Edit the Pandorabot, open the Contents tab, select all of the contents items, drag them to a folder, and close the edit window. Edit your modifiable object, open the Contents tab, select all of the Pandorabot files you dragged to a folder, drag them to your new object's contents, and close the edit window. Note, your original Pandorabot will no longer function. You can restore it by reversing this process and dragging the files back to the original Pandorabot.






An example of a Pandorabot:



References

http://www.pandorabots.com

http://www.alicebot.org/documentation/ accessed December 2010

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Pandorabot-V2-female-WikipediaChatGreetEmailSpellcheckGUI/1479613?id=1479613&slug=Pandorabot-V2-female-WikipediaChatGreetEmailSpellcheckGUI accessed December 2010