Pandorabots Challenges the Tech Giants:

An open invitation for Conversational AIs to compete in Bot Battle

San Francisco, October 27, 2020  — Pandorabots, Inc., a conversational Artificial Intelligence company, has partnered with Embody Digital, Inc., a company that enables  AI embodiment, to air a livestream  featuring a verbal sparring match between two acclaimed chatbots: Pandorabots’ Kuki  (a.k.a “Mitsuku”) and Facebook’s BlenderBot.

Pandorabots’ Kuki, which holds a world-record for most Turing Test wins , has been optimized over the course of a decade by the small, privately-held company on the basis of over a billion conversations with tens of millions of people globally. Facebook’s Blenderbot, like Google’s Meena chatbot , employs a deep learning model trained in a lab on unnamed “public domain datasources.” Both Google and Facebook announced their bots were superior  per their own internally-devised  evaluation frameworks, yet neither released a demo bot for third parties or the public to test. In fact, of all three multi billion dollar organizations claiming open-domain AI breakthroughs  this year, including OpenAI with GPT-3, only Facebook publicly released its underlying model.

With Bot Battle, Pandorabots is proposing an alternative evaluation framework  let the bots chat unsupervised ad nauseum, and let the public vote on which is better  in an open call for more industry-wide collaboration on criteria to determine what makes the “best AI.”  Anyone willing, including Google and OpenAI, is welcome to compete.

“With Bot Battle we hope to highlight the strengths as well as the weaknesses of today’s state-of-the-art conversational AI systems,” said Pandorabots CEO Lauren Kunze. “Metrics like consistency of personality and consumer engagement are critical yet often overlooked inside research labs, whose use of deep learning with public domain datasets results in bots that often spew toxic, off-brand opinions learned from the Twitter and Reddit  masses, and are therefore unusable in real world applications.”

Bot Battle also offers a glimpse at the future of “digital human” avatars backed by conversational AI, a nascent industry that has attracted significant investment  as of late. “Research shows that embodied agents, that is an AI with a body and a face, are better liked, understood, and remembered versus their voice- or text- only counterparts, because nonverbal behavior reinforces or contradicts verbal communication,”  said Dr. Ari Shapiro, former USC computer science professor and founder of Embody Digital, whose patented system turns text into humanlike gestures and expressions.

“Most ‘virtual influencers’ that appear to move or speak in real time are being puppeted by motion capture, and not driven autonomously by AI,” said Kunze. “We’re excited to showcase our unique IP in the form of the world’s first fully autonomous AI-powered livestream and for future applications of Embodied AI in new kinds of interactive media.”

One week in, Kuki is beating Blenderbot with 79% of the vote from an audience of over 10,000 viewers. Voting will remain open on Twitch and Youtube  through November 3.



About Pandorabots:

Pandorabots is the leading platform for building and deploying artificially intelligent chatbots. Over 250,000 registered developers have built more than 325,000 chatbots that have conversed +90 billion times with human end-users on voice and messaging channels. Developers and enterprises, including Fortune 500s and global brands, use Pandorabots' cloud services to easily build conversational interfaces for applications.

To learn how you can work with Kuki or Pandorabots, contact: info@pandorabots.com 


About Embody Digital:

Embody Digital is a Los Angeles based software technology company that enables artificial intelligence solutions to power a human-like body and face for digital humans and robots to improve interactions between business and customers. Their products include software that automatically transforms chat-based interactions into digital humans. The target markets include customer service, video games, social media, health care, training, robotics, and other computer-based automated communication.

To bring your conversational AIs to life, contact:
info@embodydigital.com