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[SOLVED] Network issues and numerous bot restarts

Bots are up and running

Today we were fighting a network issue which caused some bots (actually, about 10% of our hosted bots) to login and logout periodically.

The problem started with some bots getting frozen: they were not responding to the watchdog service commands (this is a SmartBots internal service which pokes bots periodically to restart those which lost a connection to the reality). Thus, bots began to restart.

However, the bots just restarted were still unavailable: they were connecting but then frozen again. Our emergency team got a signal that something is wrong: the number of crazy bots has increased to several percents. Even during a SL rolling restarts, this amount never exceeds 2-3% of bots total.

(more…)

Posted in Maintenance,Personal bot hosting,Sudden | No comments

New AI autoresponder instead of Pandora

Google API.AI chatbots for Second Life bots As you may know, SmartBots was using AI chatbots made by Pandorabots.

Pandorabots was a free service at the beginning, but then they switched to a paid model (quite expensive as you may see). However, for several years the old-good free Pandorabot API was working along with a paid version, and our bots were using it. Today, it seems that free features of Pandorabot have gone completely – the old address is not responding anymore.

Meet Google’s API.AI

Thus, we’ve examined the AI chatbots market and decided to switch to Google’s API.AI (https://api.ai/). This is an awesome AI chatbot service which has a single disadvantage compared to Pandorabots: the default chatbot setup is rather dumb and requires training. Well, we will.

Some of SmartBots bots already respond using API.AI, while some are still trying to reach Pandora. This will be solved within a next rolling restart.

Custom AI

As you may know, previously you were able to setup your own AI chatbot with Pandorabots. API.AI also allows using custom chatbots, so you are welcome to create account at https://api.ai/, create your own AI chatbot and train it. Once you are done, please contact us to connect your AI chatbot with SmartBots (this is not an automatic procedure yet but it will).

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (4)

All systems nominal, Playground fixed

Unscheduled maintenance We’ve encountered login errors at Bots Playground after a software update (a third-party node npm package changed its behavior).

Sorry for the mess, everything is up and running now!

Tags: broken login, it was working on dev server!, sudden maintenance
Posted in Bots Playground,Sudden | No comments

Crossing sim borders is cool with SmartBots

Bots crossing sim borders “Sim-border crossing” is the moment when you (your your bot) moves from one region to another (a nearby one). A lot of SL projects (for example, traveling) cover multiple sims.

SmartBots and multi-sim support

Till recently, SmartBots bots were single-sim. Today we are proud to present a complete multi-sim support! Your bots may move across sims now.

Enable it

Since this is a resource-consumptive option, it is disabled by default. To enable it, visit your Bot Control Panel and enable the new feature:

control-panel-multi-sim-bot

See it

To see how sim-crossing works with bots, visit Elite Equestrian project. Along with beautiful horses, you will be able to travel across the multiple sims in a cart or on horseback.

Visit Elite Equestrian

Tags: cool traveling, me and my vehicle crossing regions, multi-sim, sim-border crossing, sim-borders
Posted in New features,Personal bot hosting | No comments