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Pandorabots Review - Summary

What is Pandorabots?

Pandorabots is an open-source chatbot framework that allows people to build and publish AI-powered chatbots on the web, mobile applications, and messaging apps like LINE, Slack, WhatsApp, and Telegram.

Although the Pandorabots framework has been available since 2008, the actual usefulness of Pandorabots technology is still yet to be fully realized by businesses. That’s not to say that Pandorabots technology is severely lacking when compared to other artificial intelligence chatbot software, instead, it’s to say that AI simply isn’t advanced enough in 2020 to rely on its accuracy to support customers, understand human intent, or make complex sales without built-in live chat software tools that trigger the assistance of a human.

The Pandorabots chatbot framework is based on AIML (artificial intelligence markup language) scripting language, which developers can use to create conversational bots. The downside is that Pandorabots only utilizes the AIML language, and therefore doesn’t include machine learning tools that are common on other chatbot building platforms.

Ultimately, Pandorabots is a pretty cool platform that’s experienced notoriety, as well as longevity in an increasingly competitive environment. But in terms of a chatbot platform that you could use for your business, Pandorabots relies too heavily on their AI-powered technology and lacks the business tools that chatbots built for marketing and sales have in spades.

Channels: Web chat, mobile apps, messaging apps

Pricing - Pandorabots:

Overall Rating - Pandorabots:

What You’ll Learn
Pandorabots Features
Integrations and API
Pandorabots Pricing
Pros and Cons - Pandorabots
Pandorabots Review - Final Analysis
Pandorabots Competitors and Alternatives
Frequently Asked Questions

Pandorabots Features

  • AIML (artificial intelligence markup language): AIML stands for Artificial Intelligence Modelling Language. AIML is an XML based markup language, which is used to build artificially intelligent applications. AIML makes it possible to create user interfaces that are built to be used by humans while keeping the implementation simple to program, easy to understand, as well as maintainable.
  • Web hosting and publishing: Develop and edit your Pandorabots online.
Pandorabots review - Pandorabots dashboard
  • Documentation and training: Pandorabots has lots of free documentation, an online community, and training courses available online for developers.
  • Multilingual: Using AIML scripts, you can build bots in any natural language.
  • Voice-enabled: Create bots for speech-to-text as well as text-to-speech.
  • Supported programming languages: Although AIML is the scripting language of Pandarabots, it also has SDKs available for you to access the Pandorabots API using Java, Node.js, Go, PHP, Python, and Ruby.
  • Integrate with external knowledge sources: API access to semantic databases and other web-based knowledge sources.
  • Mitsuku Module: If you want access to Pandorabots Mitsuku Module, you’ll need to contact them for pricing. Mitsuku (AKA Kuki), is an award-winning conversational chatbot. If you’re willing to pay a pretty penny, you can use the Mitsuku Module to deploy your own semi-life-like chatbot on web chat, Facebook Messenger, KiK, and Telegram.
  • Premium services: Pandorabots also offers paid-for services, such as its trademarked AIaaS (artificial intelligence as a service), clients for mobile applications on major platforms, web hosting services, software solutions, training, consulting, and data services.
Pandorabots Review - Pandorabots Mitsuku Module

Pandorabots Integrations

Pandorabots documentation explains the AIML markup you need to deploy your bot to messaging apps, like Facebook Messenger, Viber, and WeChat. It also includes tutorials for deploying your bot to Slack and for quickly setting up a chat widget for your website.

The chat widget option is particularly useful if you’re deploying your chatbot on its own domain. Maintaining a consistent, branded website for your bot is always a good idea since third-party platforms (and their user bases) constantly shift and evolve. By giving your bot a permanent home, such as a .BOTbot top-level domain name, you’re showing users that they can always find your bot—even after they stop using Facebook Messenger, Viber, or another platform.

Pandorabots API and SDK

The Pandorabots API allows you to integrate its bot hosting service and natural language processing engine into your own application. Using the Pandorabots Platform, you can manage all bot development on its user interface, and deploy your bot to production channels.

Pandorabots also has a Legacy API platform that offers an API for bot development options such as creating a chatbot, uploading files, compiling code and data, deleting a chatbot, and talking to a bot (in a variety of ways) as it’s a separate platform with no user interface.

The platform also offers a number of free SDKs that support various programming languages that are available for download on Github. Those languages consist of Java, Node.js, and Python. These modules provide methods for all of Pandorabots APIs.

Lastly, Pandorabots also has publicly available SDKs developed by the Pandorabots community. Those SDKs are available in Ruby, PHP, and Go programming languages.

Pandorabots Pros and Cons

Pros - Pandorabots

  • AIML scripting language: Both a pro and con of Pandorabots is its framework built-on AIML scripting language. AIML is highly versatile and has received lots of praise from developers. Pandorabots AIML provides flexibility because you have full access to the tools powering your bots. Many other chatbot building frameworks, such as machine learning systems like Google’s Dialogflow or IBM Watson have a proprietary layer masking the code, which you don’t own. Additionally, you also will not own your data with Dialogflow or Watson, and those platforms can’t be made to be effective without large amounts of training data.
  • Open-source: Pandorabots is an open-source platform, so you own your data and can download your code.
  • Pre-defined content libraries provide some shortcuts: Pandorabots does come with pre-built dialogues, so you don’t need to manually teach every chatbot to respond with phrases as simple as, “Hello, thank you for your question.”
  • Deploy on multiple channels: You can place your Pandorabot on both voice and messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Twilio, LINE, Viber, WeChat, and others.

 

Cons - Pandorabots

  • AIML scripting language: Pandorabots strengths are also its weaknesses. AIML language requires that you define your own input/output pairs, or rules. Unlike other bot frameworks that rely on other machine learning models, the need to define all the inputs and outputs on your own make building a chatbot a long and complicated process.
  • Accuracy and reliability for business: Even if your machine learning chatbot can answer 80% of questions correctly (which has never been proven out on any chatbot platform), that’s still leaving far too many unanswered questions and therefore upset website visitors and customers to consider building a bot that relies completely on itself. Without business tools to pass conversations that your bot cannot handle onto your live agents, Pandorabots simply isn’t one of the best AI chatbot platforms for business.
  • Not advisable to host your bot: You cannot license and download an on-premise version of the Pandorabots platform, as it’s a SaaS offering that requires high-levels of expertise to run. Unless you’re extremely advanced and can build an interpreter from scratch, it’s recommended you use Pandorabots interpreter-as-a-service. If hosting your bot is a requirement of yours, you should look into using a framework with an on-premise option.

Pandorabots Pricing

How much does Pandorabots cost? Pandorabots has four different plans, which consist of a free version, the Developer plan, the Pro plan, and an Enterprise plan.

On Pandorabots free version, which is named Sandbox, you get a development sandbox, unlimited messages in the sandbox, community support, and Pandorabots open-source chatbot library.

With the Pandorabots Developer plan, you get everything in the Sandbox plan, as well as API access, the chat widget and a landing page, up to 10K messages per month, trial access to Pandorabots live training, and email support. The Developer plan is $19 per month + $9 per 3rd party channels (such as Facebook or Twilio) + $3 per every additional 1K messages you send after reaching the 10K message threshold. So, let’s say you had 25K messages and you used 3 third party channels, for example. This would cost you $19 (monthly fee) + $45 (additional 15K messages) + $27 (three third-party channels) = $91 total for that month.

On the Pro plan, you get everything in the Sandbox and Developer plan, as well as unlimited third party channels, up to 100K messages, full access to Pandorabots live training, as well as email, chat, and phone support. Pandorabots Pro plan costs $199 per month, plus $2.50 per 1K messages over the 100K message threshold. Therefore, if you had 200K messages in a month, your total would be $449 for the month.

Lastly, for the Pandorabots Enterprise plan, you get everything in the Sandbox, Developer and Pro plan, plus “more” API access, “more” third party channels, “more” live training, and access to the Mitsuku Module. With much of the Enterprise plan having overtly ambiguous implications as to what’s included, it’s no surprise that you will need to contact Pandorabots for pricing.

Development work and consulting services from Pandorabots are available for an additional, separate fee.

Pandorabots Review - Pandorabots Pricing

Pandorabots Review - Final Analysis

Pandorabots founders refer to themselves as the “Original Gangsters” of chatbots. Unfortunately, being the original in emerging technologies, such as conversational artificial intelligence, doesn’t mean you’re going to be the best.

Pandorabots has been responsible for notable chatbots, such as A.L.I.C.E. (Alicebot), which is a three-time Loebner-winner, and partly inspirational for the movie Her. Additionally, the Mitsuku chatbot, built using Pandorabots AIML framework, is a five-time Loebner Prize winner based on the ability to pass the Turing Test. Mitsuku has been featured in a number of news outlets, such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, Guardian, Wired, and Radiolab. Winning the Turing Test five times is definitely impressive, as the winner is chosen by the ability to realize whether or not you’re speaking to a robot. No AI has every truly ‘passed’ the Turing Test, as that would require a real-life robot that you met in person and were not able to tell that you had just interacted with something that isn’t human.

This brings us to the reason why we can’t recommend Pandorabots as a true business application. Because at this point in time, even the most ‘intelligent’ of chatbots, are nothing more than an inspiration for what could be. In reality, a 100% AI-powered bot is not actually business-ready.

Here’s a perfect example of why that is:

Pandorabots review - Pandorabots chatbot example Mitsuku

Are you sure you want your chatbot to tell your customers that their memory is bad? Probably not, and especially not if your customers are led to believe that they’re talking to a human.

The bottom line when it comes to Pandorabots is that it absolutely is a notable chatbot building platform, and they deserve the recognition that they’ve received in the conversational AI space. However, Pandorabots is currently more for experimentation purposes than it is a chatbot builder for business.

Pandorabots Competitors and Alternatives

At Chatbots.org, we’ve reviewed and ranked hundreds of chatbots and chat platforms. We also rank these chatbots by category.

Here’s how Pandorabots stacks up against the competition (#1 being the best) in the “Best Chatbot” categories the platform qualified for:

 

Best Chatbots for Sales

Pandorabots: #13 out of 25.

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Ecommerce Chatbots

Pandarabots: #4 out of 24.

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Customer Service Chatbot

Pandorabots: #14 out of 29.

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Best Chatbot Builders

Pandorabots: #11 out of 20.

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Facebook Messenger Chatbots

Pandorabots: #12 out of 28.

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Best Web Chat Apps

Pandorabots: #4 out of 11.

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Artificial Intelligence Chatbots

Pandorabots: #2 out of 29.

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Chatbots for Marketing

Pandorabots: #18 out of 31.

Read More >>

Pandorabots Frequently Asked Questions

AIML stands for Artificial Intelligence Modelling Language. AIML is an XML based markup language, which is used to build artificially intelligent applications. AIML makes it possible to create user interfaces, built to be used by humans while keeping the implementation simple to program, easy to understand and highly maintainable.

Currently, there’s no clear favorite among the best AI-powered chatbots for business in regard to the level of intelligence. However, from a business perspective, there are a handful of AI chatbots that stand out in the crowd. To see the top-ranked AI chatbots for business in 2020, take a look at these 29 best AI chatbot platforms for both SMBs and enterprise-level companies. #1 on the best AI chatbots for business is MobileMonkey.

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