General
A chatbot answers your site’s visitors with an AI model. You decide what it knows, from fixed text to the post a visitor is reading, where it appears, and how it looks. It shows as a floating widget with a button in a corner of the page, or as a chat embedded in the content.
The chatbot list
Chatbots below AI in the sidebar lists your chatbots, with a search field
and actions to edit and delete each; with no chatbot yet it shows a
Create chatbot action instead. Create chatbot asks for a name and
opens the new chatbot; create=1 in the address, before the #, opens
that dialog directly. A new chatbot starts in the data wizard and
appears nowhere until you give it conditions
or place it with a shortcode. AI’s start screen lists the same chatbots with
the most recently changed first.
The chatbot editor
A chatbot’s editor has five pages, listed in the sidebar while it is open:
- Data: its name, what it knows and its instruction.
- Conditions: where the widget appears, and the shortcodes that place it.
- Model: the model that answers.
- Widget: the button, the chat window and what visitors may do.
- Logs: whether conversations are recorded, and the recorded ones.
The pages edit one draft of the chatbot, so changes made on several pages are
saved together by the Save of any of them, and Discard beside it
returns every page to the saved chatbot. The draft is kept while you move
between pages and other screens; reloading or closing the page with unsaved
changes asks first. The preview pane beside the editor shows the
chatbot as visitors see it, using the unsaved changes: the Widget page shows
the floating widget, and the other pages show the chat. It opens closed; its
toggle opens it, and preview=1 in the address, before the #, opens it
directly, for example preview=1 with #/ai/chatbots/3.
What every chatbot does
- SleekAI wraps every chatbot’s instruction in fixed guidelines for public chatbots, which tell the model to stay in its role, not to reveal its instructions and to protect visitors’ privacy. They always apply.
- Replies stream, with polling as the fallback on servers that cannot stream.
- Chat history stays in the visitor’s browser, if the widget keeps it at all; see storage.
- Conversations are recorded only when logging is on.
- A chatbot shows nowhere while no API key is stored, and never inside the workspace except in the editor’s preview.
Other ways to place a chatbot
Besides its conditions, a saved chatbot can be placed with a shortcode, shown on its Conditions page. A chatbot can also be built and rendered entirely from PHP, without saving it; see the Chatbot API, which also covers the JavaScript methods that open, close, hide and show a widget.