Hi all,
I've been experimenting with AI Chatbots to help answer questions about using Voice, and I have enabled one on the site now.
It's only visible on the main Voice site and in the documentation pages - not on community websites!
It's imaginatively called Voicebot, and you can access it by clicking the icon on the bottom right of the page.
Voicebot has been trained on all the Documentation resources, so you can ask technical questions and it'll hopefully give a reasonable answer, with a reference to the source material where appropriate.
So next time you have a question, you can of course ask on the forums here, or you can try asking Voicebot to see if that gets you to a solution any more quickly!
I've tried a few questions/requests and it seems to give sensible information. For example:
- What is Voice?
- How much does a Voice website cost?
- Can I use a custom domain?
- How do I change theme?
- How do I edit a page?
- How do I restore an item from trash?
- Tell me how to add a picture.
- Change logo.
- How do I access the wysiwyg editor?
- When is the next Voice User Group meeting?
Feedback is welcome!
Thanks
Joe
Thanks for doing this Joe! Looks good - I tried "How do I add a footer to my website" and got a good reply.
Can I ask what level service you've opted for https://botsonic.com/pricing
Thanks
Sue
Yeah, Voicebot seems to be doing OK so far. It's early days but I'm optimistic!
In answer to the questions:
Was it hard to set up?
Not especially, though it wasn't trivial. I looked at quite a few providers with the main requirements that:
- It can be trained on a reasonably large number of pages in order to be able to feed it all the Voice documentation.
- An easy way to give it all the URLs to train on.
- Cheap/free - I only need basic functions so it needs a payment plan that isn't too expensive.
- A free trial so I could test it out before subscribing.
- Easy to embed on a website, with a few customisation options.
I settled on Botsonic as it did a pretty good job fulfilling the requirements.
Training
I set up a general Botsonic bot then trained it on the documentation by giving it the URL of the sitemap.xml.
Note: all Voice sites have a sitemap.xml that search engines use to find all the site content. It can be found at https://e-voice.org.uk/yoursitename/content-sitemap.xml (or https://yourcustomdomainname.com/content-sitemap.xml)
I also fed it all the content from the main Voice site, including the forums. But that didn't go so well so I removed the forums content, leaving just the other general Voice content and info on creating a new site.
It's also possible to give it custom Q&As to train on. I've done a couple of these and may do more - perhaps based on info from the forums after I've cleaned it up to remove info on bug fixes etc.
Once trained I embedded it onto the site and here we are!
Service level/cost
Currently I'm using the seven day free trial to see how well it works. Though when that finishes I'll switch to the Starter plan. This has all the features I need and costs $19/month (two months free if paid annually).
How to set up your own
- Have a look around to see which website chatbot would work for you. There are quite a few, with different training capabilities and costs.
- Sign up to the one you like, and try training it on your website content. Use the content-sitemap.xml if you like, though be prepared to prune the training URLs as necessary.
- Many chatbots can also be trained with offline documents and FAQs etc by uploading them into their admin pages.
- Test it out with sample questions.
- Embed it on your site by adding their widget code into the Raw Footer HTML of your theme settings.
Cheers
Joe