I added an AI chatbot at my site andreas.com. Try it out! Scroll to the bottom of this page, click my cat (lower right corner), ask him anything, and you'll get an answer.
Why I Did This
To learn how to do this and teach it to my classes. Students can set up AIs for their websites. (BTW, I don’t expect this catbot will lead to lots of traffic at my site. I’m doing this to learn how it works.)
Why You Should Do This
An AI-powered website lets your visitors ask anything. You choose what the AI knows, so you can offer unique information. Most websites will soon have AI chatbots.
How to Add to Your Website
You can set this up in 15 minutes. If you know how to add Google or Facebook tracking tags to your site, you can add an AI to your website.
Chatling gives you a line of code (similar to Google or Facebook tracking tags). Copy and paste into your webpage. If you use HTML5, open the HTML and paste. If you use a CRM such as Wix or WordPress, use a tag manager to add the tag.
The icon appears immediately on your web page. The chatbot works on both desktop and mobile, Android and Apple.
You Can Add Your Documents to Your Chatbot
Chatling accepts a website URL (it’ll scan the entire site), a list of URLs (you choose which URLs), an XML sitemap (another way to choose the pages), PDFs, plain text, and other formats.
I converted two of my books to PDF and used drag-and-drop to add them to Chatling. It processed the books in a few minutes.
You can also add FAQ (a list of questions and answers).
Configuration and Options in Chatling
You can set the image in the icon (your logo, your face, your cat), colors, and so on.
I added "show source" so people see the URL at andreas.com that has the answer.
I added a few prompting questions to the catbot: Ask about digital marketing. Ask about SEO. And so on.
What Are People Asking My Catbot
You can also see what people are asking your chatbot. There are lots of interesting questions that I’d never imagined. BTW, you can’t see the identity of people who are asking questions.
About the Number of Characters and Words
Chatling counts words, not tokens. For example, “cat” is three characters. On average there are 4.64 letters per word, 250 words per page, and ~1,160 letters on one page of text.
The free account accepts up to 500,000 characters, which is about 400 pages. One of my books is 180 pages in paperback. Chatling counted that as 305,130 tokens. The $25 per month account can accept 20 million characters, which is about 16,000 pages of text. You can add additional characters at $2 per million.
Tip: Prepare your text before you upload it. Remove all unnecessary text (table of contents, index, page numbers, etc.). Ask an AI to rewrite your text to show only necessary information. Ask it to rewrite sections into heading, summary, and bullet points. This creates better text (and fewer characters) for the Chatling AI.
Other Chatbots
There are dozens of chatbots. Search for “compare AI-powered chatbots for a website.”
I chose Chatling.ai because it offers a free-forever plan, no credit card for signup, and it was easy to install and test. See their pricing at https://chatling.ai/pricing