I’m working on a Pandorabots-style bot hosting service where you can create bots powered by RiveScript!

It’s not quite done yet (needs a bit of sanding around the edges still), but I’m taking a break from programming for the night and I have some screenshots to show off!

http://imgur.com/a/qdcyi#0

So, here’s all the things that work so far:

[ul]
[li]Create one or many bots[/li]
[li]Create and edit your replies through a web page[/li]
[li]Upload RS documents from disk, download your entire brain as a zip file full of RS documents[/li]
[li]Chat with your bot (of course). There’s a JSON-based API system built in too![/li]
[/ul]

Unlike Pandorabots, I’m going with the RunABot approach of having users select a base brain for their bots. This is because Alice takes a while to load into the RiveScript interpreter and that would be too much overhead if I got any sizable number of bots all using Alice.

Instead, your bot’s replies are checked, and if nothing matches, then it will fall back to a single, shared, Alice instance (don’t worry, your user’s variables will be plucked back out from the Alice instance after each time she’s called. All this does is save on memory and speed by only having to load her 93,000 triggers into memory once).

Thoughts? Concerns? Excited?

Wow, what a great idea. This is the sort of service I was looking for when I first discovered chatbots. (I had a Zabaware bot for a little while, years ago, ‘til I grew too disappointed with its limitations.) I like your layout—it feels intuitive and allows beginners to dive in while not stymieing advanced users.

If a developer has already created a RiveScript bot, how easy is it to upload the entire brain to the hosting service? What sort of price structure are you putting in place? Are you hosting these yourself or through a service?

I’m planning on making it possible to upload a zip file full of RS code, so if you already have a bot with a few dozen files you’d be able to upload them all at once.

I’m not putting a price structure in place yet; it will be free for most users, until I discover any performance problems that might come up from having really large bots. I’ll probably do something similar to Pandorabots, and put in a pricing system only for the heaviest users that put the system under the most load. I’m predicting that you should easily be able to have 10,000-20,000 replies in your bot before it would start causing any noticeable performance issues (the whole Alice brain takes about 8 seconds to load into memory for example, and it has about 90,000 replies). Most people wouldn’t have bots that large I think (but I also don’t want everybody to upload their own copy of Alice either; it would defeat the purpose of having Alice be a “base brain” to help with possible performance issues).

For now I’m hosting this on my own web server. It’s a dedicated service with a decent amount of RAM and disk space, and it currently goes under-utilized now with only a half dozen small little websites running on it.