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Quickstart

This quickstart is designed to help you create your first AI Assistant.​

Through this quickstart, you will learn:

  • How to create your first AI Assistant;
  • How to teach your Assistant domain-specific knowledge;
  • How to modify the settings;
  • Good testing practices and integrations.

Video Tutorial​

If you'd like to view a video version of this Quickstart guide, please find the video below:

Creating your first AI Assistant​

Congratulations! You have set up your free account, and are ready to create your first AI Assistant.

In this quickstart, we teach by example, and show how to create an AI Assistant for an online Apple product reseller MacShop in a few easy to follow steps.

Set up your AI Assistant​

Name the Assistant​

The first step to setting your AI Assistants name by setting the Project name in the AI Setup tab of the Knowledge base. This is the name the Assistant will refer to when asked e.g. "Who are you?", so it should be related to it's function, your business, etc.

Our AI Assistant works for MacShop and will be named "Helpful Macintosh".

Naming the Assistant Demo

Add a short description​

In the description, you explain what your AI Assistant's task is in the context of your business. Let's take a few examples:

  • You run an e-commerce business selling superfoods called Your Super and want an AI Shopping Assistant. You might write "Your Superfoods is a brand that offers organic, 100% plant-based superfood mixes to improve your health and beauty. Your task is to enhance customers' shopping experience by offering advice on products.
  • You own an energy company Energy4You and need an AI Assistant to help your users run simple tasks like reading the energy meter. You could say: "Energy4You is one of the world's largest electric utility company, bringing energy to 700M homes around the globe. Your task is to assist users in carrying out tasks they need help with."

In MacShop's case, the Assistant should answer customers questions about Apple products as well as suggest discounts, when available.

Short Description Demo

AI Guidelines​

With AI Guidelines, you can easily give clear instructions and commands to your AI Assistant. Rather than specifying personality traits or behaviors you want your AI to display, which can be done in the settings, here you can include e.g. seasonal promo codes; specify what the Assistant should never do, like give health advice; or what the AI Assistant should always do, e.g. use emojis in responses, ask follow-up questions.

tip

It's also okay to not give your AI any guidelines immediately, and come back to them to refine your AI Assistants responses after you've tested it.

Helpful Macintosh, our AI Assistant, should focus on answering questions about Apple products only, we don't want it talking to users about e.g. Samsung products. The Assistant should also offer the special winter discount code to encourage purchases.

AI Guidelines Demo

Add knowledge​

Great! We have so far named our Assistant and defined what it will be responsible for. Now it's time to give it some knowledge so it can actually assist our customers.

The Knowledge Base is responsible for just that. It's where we can upload, edit, and validate text to supplement our AI's understanding of a company, products, or project. To build and format your knowledge base, you can:

  • Manually create articles by inputting text into the app;
  • Upload PDF files;
  • Import website contents by providing URLs;
  • Upload Intercom Articles (if you have an Intercom Integration set-up);
  • Or provide short bits of knowledge.

What would be a Helpful Macintosh without knowledge of the newest Apple products? We upload URLs to MacBook Pro, and iPhone 15 as follows:

Uploading URLs
Adding URLs to articles

Test drive​

We have created Helpful Macintosh, an AI Assistant answering questions and advising about Apple products on MacShop's website. We taught it a bit about the newest Apple products and gave it clear instructions on what to do. Let's take it for a test drive before we proceed further.

tip

Remember to always retrain your AI Assistant after adding new knowledge.

Test Drive 1
Test Drive 2: What if we try to talk to the bot about the competitor product, Samsung? ;)

Adjusting the settings​

As MacShop grows and expands to foreign markets, the need for Helpful Macintosh to speak different languages arises. We want the Assistant to speak Spanish, and we can easily adjust it in the Settings tab.

Language Settings Demo

Additionally, we can specify Custom Translation behaviors we want Helpful Macintosh to adhere to. For example, if we care that the discount code is translated to Spanish, and that Apple always stays the brand name and doesn't become the fruit, we can specify these as follows:

Custom Translations Demo
tip

Large language models are usually good at differentiating names and nouns, which means Custom Translations are not necessary in most cases and should be treated on a case-by-case basis rather than preventatively.

Conversation style​

For the sake of this simple quickstart, we will skip changing the AI personality, creativity level and reply length. We discuss these and provide multiple examples in the [Deep Dive section](Diving Deeper/Diving Deeper.md).

Human Handoff​

Helpful Macintosh is a very knowledgeable assistant, but sometimes a customer just needs to speak to a human agent. Below we demonstrate a basic Human Handoff setup, where we enable AI Summaries and specify e-mail where notifications about requests to speak to a human agent will be sent. These AI Summaries will give the human agent an overview of the exchange between our AI Assitant and the user, removing the need to go through the entire conversation.

Handoff Demo

Ready, set, use! — Testing and integrating​

This is it! We created an AI Assistant, Helpful Macintosh, for the online store MacShop, we taught it the relevant knowledge, we specified the desired behavior and took care of situations where the customer needs to speak to a human agent. Now we can enjoy the fruit of our labors and use the Assistant.

To let users beta-test it via a link or an embedded chat pop-up on MacShops website, we navigate to the Integrations tab in the left panel and select either of the two top options.

The public link simply gives you a shareable chat window to talk to the AI Assistant.

Integrations - public link

To embed on the website, you will need to access the source code of your page. Follow the instructions given, or reach out to your developer responsible for website development for further assistance.

Integrations - embed on your website
tip

For more advanced integrations please refer to the Integrations section.