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