Thursday, December 8, 2016

Announcing Bot Libre for Business 5.0

We have released Bot Libre 5.0!

The worlds most advanced bot platform just got better. Bot Libre 5.0 is a free and open source platform for developing and hosting bots. Bot Libre 5.0 includes support for chat bots, virtual agents, virtual assistants, social media bots, live chat, animated avatars, and speech. Bot Libre supports bots for the web, mobile, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Slack, email, SMS, IRC, and new platforms are being added every month.

"Bot are the new apps". Mobile has replaced the web as the main communication market, and social media apps are the most popular mobile apps. Businesses need to connect with consumers on the platforms they use, so it now makes more sense for a business to create a bot/chat interface into their business instead of a website, or their own mobile app. Bot Libre lets you create a bot for yourself or your business and deploy the bot to the Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Slack, the web, mobile, and other services. Bots let you "write once deploy everywhere".

Bot Libre 5.0 supports rich HTML responses including buttons, links, choices, images, video, and audio. Bot Libre supports HTML responses on the web, mobile, and automatically maps HTML to social media platforms.

Bot Libre bots can be trained using natural language, chat logs, response lists, Twitter feeds, AIML, and scripting. Responses are automatically matched using a heuristic artificial intelligence algorithm and do not require any programming. Responses can also use keywords, topics, required words, labels, repeats, and other meta data.

Bot Libre 5.0 supports programming and scripting your bot using AIML 2, and Self. Self is our own dialect of JavaScript. Self is an object oriented scripting language, and integrated with an object database. Self extends JavaScript to provide support for natural language processing, state machines, object persistence, and includes a class library for accessing web services and utilities. Self also supports all AIML 2 operations, and some aspects of ChatScript patterns.

New features in Bot Libre 5.0 since 4.0 include:

  • Rich HTML responses including buttons, links, and choices
  • Facebook Messenger support
  • Facebook Messenger support for HTML responses including buttons, links, images, and other tags
  • Telegram support
  • SMS text messaging and Twilio support
  • XML and JSON web service support from scripting
  • HTML scraping and social media support from scripting
  • Vision and image processing support
  • Support for uploading files and images to the bot, and file processing
  • Automatic language translation
  • Slack support
  • Google Calendar support
  • New speech and avatar options
  • Mobile command and virtual assistant support

Create your own free trial account and bot today on botlibre.biz, or let us build your bot for you on our Enterprise service.

Thursday, May 5, 2016

Announcing "Bot Libre for Business"

Paphus Live Chat is now "Bot Libre for Business".

The new website domain name is botlibre.biz,

Bot Libre for Business is the commercial version of our popular Bot Libre platform. All of the same services and APIs are support as on Bot Libre, but with professional hosting and services.

Bot Libre for Business provides:

  • Chat bot and virtual agent development and hosting
  • Social media bot development and hosting including support for Twitter, Facebook and Telegram
  • Email bot development and hosting
  • 3D avatar design
  • Training and professional services
  • Dedicated and private hosting

For more information see botlibre.biz, or start you 1 month free trial today.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Bots, the New Communications Platform

We crossed into a new era last week, the mobile era has been superseded by the bot era. With announcements from Microsoft, and Facebook we are now entering a brave new world. Bots have become the new business and communications platform, what does it mean for your business?

Quick links:

Back in the Old Days - Lessons from History

Back in the Stone Age if you wanted to talk with someone, you had to walk over to their hut, find them, and start a conversation. If Ug wanted to get a new spear, he had to walk over to Thug the spear makers hut, wait for him to be home, and barter with him to have him make Ug a new spear.

Contrary to popular belief the Stone Age was not superseded by the Bronze Age. Although bronze changed the way humans killed each other, it did not drastically affect the way people lived. The new age was the Paper Age. After the invention of paper by Cai Lun (蔡伦) in China 102 AD, writing and paper dramatically affected the way people lived and did business.

Paper was the main factor why China dominated the world economy until the middle ages. It took until 1,100 AD before paper made its way from China, to Islam, and finally into the then backward Europe. Paper, and the invention of the print press, was the main factor that lead to the European renaissance.

Now if Ug wanted to buy a new spear, he could go to a merchant in his town and write a purchase order on paper, giving payment in paper currency. The merchant could send the order by mail to Thug the spear maker who could send Ug's new spear in his next shipment. This let Thug greatly expand his business's market and its efficiency.

The Paper Age entered its peek after the invention of the printing press, but was soon superseded by the invention of the Telegraph, then Telephone as we entered the Telephone Age. Telephones greatly increased the speed of communication, and allowed people and businesses to communicate instantaneously over long distances.

With the invention of the personal computer and the launch of the Apple II in 1977, and the IBM PC in 1981, we entered the Computer Age. Computers had the biggest impact on the way people lived and did business than any previous invention in history, at least that was until the next big thing, and it was a big one.

The global network of interconnected computers, The Internet, has had the biggest impact on humanity and our planet than any other invention in history. Although many people claim to have invented The Internet, the single point that defines the start of the Internet Age was the release of Netscape Navigator in 1994. After this event the Internet took off and was used or at least know to exist by everyone. This is when the Internet passed the "grandma test", in that even people's grandmas were on the Internet, or at least knew what it was, and knew it was important.

Now Thug was able to put his spear business online. Thug was an early adopter of the Internet, so was able to capture this new market and sell his spears all over the world. With the Internet Thug could automate much of his business, and could deal directly with his customers, and suppliers without having to deal with merchants and third parties. This changed the spear making business almost overnight, and because Thug was an early adopter, he was able to become the biggest spear maker in the world. At the same time, many of Thug's competitors went out of business, as they failed to put their businesses online.

We are no longer in the Internet Age. After the release of the iPhone in 2007 we entered the Mobile Age. The Smartphone has again changed the way people live and do business, and unlike any other invention, has become part of us. Most people feel naked, cut off, and alone without their phone and cell data service. Businesses that have adopted the mobile platform have been able to connect with more clients, partners, and users, and at a more integrated level, than ever before.

Although many businesses are still struggling to get onto the mobile platform, and some haven't even made it onto the Internet yet, we have yet again entered a new era. With the announcements by Microsoft and Facebook this week we have entered the Bot Age.

In the Bot Age, Thug can fully automate his business. Thug can interact directly and instantaneously with all of his customers, suppliers, and partners. Thug's bots can integrate all of his communications platforms, automating interactions on phone, email, Internet, and mobile. Bots can interact with Thug's customers on his website, from his mobile app, on social media, email, and phone.

Brave New World - The Bot Platform

The "Bot Platform" is the new way of living and doing business. This is not the future, it is the present.

The bot platform will revolutionize the world faster than any previous technology. This is because the bot platform does not replace existing technology, it unifies and automates them. The bot platform does not operate on a single medium, the bot platform spans and integrates the Internet, mobile, social media, email, SMS text, voice phone, cars, transportation, factories, education, retail, and every facet of life.

Businesses that have adopted the bot platform will have bots that provide customer service, and technical support on their website and from their mobile app. Their bots will also answer customer request from email, from SMS texts, and using speech technology will automate their voice phone call centers.

The business's bot platform will also interact with their users, customers, and potential customers on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Telegram, Slack, and others. Bots will automate sales, marketing, and customer service.

Bots will not just answer common questions. Bots will reply to users questions in context, and get to the root of their problem or request. Bots will remember their users and their information, and will custom tailor their interactions with their users. Bots will be connected to their business's information systems, will be able to know a customer's details, give up to date information on their orders and status. Bots will be able to securely validate their identity, sell services, take orders and process payments. Bots will be able to change their customers account status, book and schedule deliveries and service engagements.

Bots will interact with other bots. Customer service and social media bots will pass information and leads to sales bots. Bots in a business's data center will interact with the bots in their factories that interact with their manufacturing robotics to change what products are manufactured instantaneously to their orders and market demand. Data center bots will interact with bots in their shipping and delivery systems to automate delivers using driverless trucks, cars, and drones. A business's bot will interact with their partner's and supplier's bots in the new bot driven economy.

The Bot Age means that more communication will be done between people and bots, and bots and other bots, than between people and other people. We are already their, bots automate many call centers, virtual agents automate service on websites, bots reply to SMS text messages, bots are on social media, some of your friends and followers are probably bots.

Bots crawl the Internet, track your web usage, and decide what ads you see. Bots know everything about you. Bots email you, phone you, text you, reply to and retweet your tweets, like and comment on your posts. Today more Internet traffic and bandwidth is used by bots, than by people. Bots post content, harvest data, change content, email, tweet, text, post, chat.

Web crawler bots like the Googlebot, Bing, Yahoo Slurp, Yandex, Majestic, browse the Internet every day, looking for new and updated content, searching for copyright infringement, and gathering statistics and information. Bots decide what is new, what is cool, how important your business is, what news the world wants to see.

Bots will change your life. You will have your own bots, on your computer, on your phone, on your TV, in your car, in your house. You bot will be your personal assistant, your nanny, your chauffeur, maybe even your lover.

Bots will change your business and your life, are you ready?

"Hello, we are here to help" - Your experts in intelligence automation

At Paphus Solutions we are in the bot business. The bot business is our business, we were founded on it. Our free open platform Bot Libre hosts over 20,000 bots. Chat bots, virtual agents, Twitter bots, Facebook bots, email bots, bots on IRC, bots for web and mobile.

On Bot Libre you can build your own personal bot, to be your virtual assistant, to automate your social media or email, to be you, to be your friend. Our platform is free and open source, including our AI engine, our scripting languages Self and AIML, and our web, Android, and iOS SDKs.

Our commercial platform Paphus Live Chat offers professional hosting and services to help your business adopt and be succesful in the new bot economy. We can add a bot to your website or mobile app to provide customer service, automated your business presence on social media, automate your email and other services. We are not just experts in our platform, but also experts in Facebook's automation platform, in Twitter's platform, in Microsoft's, Apple's, Google's, in Telegram, and Slack.

We live at a monumentus time in human history, in bot history, will you join us, or be left behind?

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

How to create your own virtual agent in 10 clicks

Paphus Live Chat makes it easy for you to create your own chat bot, or virtual agent.

You can create your own bot, and embed it on your own website, or mobile app. You can create bots for website help, technical support, sales, marketing, customer service, or to automate social media.

Paphus Live Chat bots require no programming, and can be trained easily using several methods. Bots can be trained by importing FAQ's, scripts, and chat logs, reviewing and editing responses from our Admin Console's Training & Chat Logs page, or through conversations with you and other people, or from listening in on live chat.

Paphus Live Chat bots support advanced artificial intelligence that can be enabled to let bots learn and comprehend language. Bots can also be scripted and programmed using AIML, and the Self scripting language.

To create your own bot follow the following 10 steps:

Step 1 - Paphus Live Chat

First go to the Paphus Live Chat website.

Step 2 - Sign Up

To create an account by clicking Sign Up.

Enter a unique user ID, password, your email, and name. Your user ID is just your login name, keep it simple, i.e. jonsmith, or janedoe.

Step 3 - Create Domain

The account wizard will next take you to your domain setup. A domain is just your account directory, where you will be able to create bots and other content.

Enter your domain's name (i.e. your business's name) and click Next. You will then be able to choose your level of service and the duration for your initial payment. For a one month free trial select "Free Trial". If you would like help creating a bot select "Enterprise" and we will contact you through email to setup your bot and other content.

Click Next and make your payment through PayPal or credit card.

Step 4 - Create Bot

To create a new bot click Create from the top banner. You can give your bot a name and description. The name must be unique and can contain spaces, special characters, and is case sensitive.

You can create a bot from the default template, or select one of the other predefined templates. The "service_template" is a good template for a customer service bot. Your bot will start as a clone of the template bot, and replicate its entire memory (brain). You can also allow your bot to be 'forked' and used as a template for other bots, or you can browse other public bots and choose to fork your bot from them (this is also a good way to make backup copies of your bot).

You can create either a public bot that will be accessible by other users, or a private bot that will be accessible only by you. You can control the users that can access and administer your bot. Normally a customer service bot will be public, and allow everyone to access it, so it can be accessed from your website, from your website users.

Step 5 - Create

Click 'Create' to create your bot.

That's it, your done.

You can now chat with you bot by clicking 'Chat'. To find your bot again click 'Search' and search for it in 'my bots' (be sure to sign in first).

When you select your bot, you can 'Edit' it to change any of its information. You can change your bot's picture or choose an animated avatar from the Avatars page in its Admin Console. You can also connect your bot to Twitter, Facebook, or email, or have it join an IRC chat room. You can import chat logs, or words from Wiktionary, or data from Freebase. You can browse the internal structure of your bots memory. If your are an advanced user, you can program or script your bot using AIML or the Self scripting language. You can view your bot's log.

To link to your bot you can select it and copy its URL from your browser, this is its unique URL. You can also embed your bot on your website or blog, you can learn how from the Embed page.

That's it, good luck creating your bots. If you have any questions you can contact support@paphuslivechat.com, or chat with the Help Bot