{"id":20330,"date":"2024-07-31T00:59:22","date_gmt":"2024-07-31T04:59:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/?p=20330"},"modified":"2024-07-31T00:59:22","modified_gmt":"2024-07-31T04:59:22","slug":"in-search-of-a-custom-ai-chatbots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/2024\/07\/31\/in-search-of-a-custom-ai-chatbots\/","title":{"rendered":"In Search of a Custom AI Chatbot"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been playing with some AI tools that let you build a custom chatbot. Matthew Vollmer, a colleague in the Department of English, mentioned back in May that he had created a custom bot that was loaded with his course documents.<\/p>\n

I was immediately envious. Sure, students could just do a search of the course documents, but they frequently don’t. The idea of loading up a bot with my course policies manual, short guide to the course, and the group guide sounded wonderful. Students could ask the bot questions, and they’d get answers right from the course documents.<\/p>\n

This evening, I played first with making my own GPT with ChatGPT (which requires a paid subscription). I wasn’t very successful so I looked for something that might be simpler. I landed on ChatBotKit<\/a>, and I love it. I only fed it my group guide to test it. Free accounts are severely limited.<\/p>\n

I set up my bot as a widget and tossed it up on a webpage to test. You can take a look for now<\/a>. I’m already getting warning about exceeding the limits for the free account, so I’ll have to take it down in the next day. Here’s a screenshot showing part of a conversation I had with it, asking questions students asked at the beginning of the Fall and Spring Semesters:<\/p>\n

\n\"A
A screenshot from ChatBotKit showing answers to two questions about student groups<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The answers shown in the screenshot come directly from my group guide. I’m almost giddy about the possibilities. Students could ask direct questions and get immediate answers. Admittedly, I would rephrase things a bit, but overall, it’s using the text that I had in the guide. I think the changes are primarily where I’ve used first-person pronouns in the group guide. The bot isn’t the “I” from that guide, so it’s rephrasing.<\/p>\n

There’s a problem however. Probably two, if I count Virginia Tech’s restrictions. We are only allowed to use approved software, and the only AI that’s approved is Copilot. The bigger issue for me personally is that the free version is not nearly enough. Pricing costs $25\/month for the Basic package. The Pro subscription, which offers a privacy option that strips any personal data all messages, is $65\/month. There’s a Team subscription that costs $365\/month as well.<\/p>\n

While ChatBotKit does exactly what I want quite easily, there’s no way I can pay $65\/month to invoke the privacy option. I’m not even able to sign up for $25\/month right now. So back to more searching for me. Why can’t I win the lottery?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been playing with some AI tools that let you build a custom chatbot. Matthew Vollmer, a colleague in the Department of English, mentioned back in May that he had created a custom bot that was loaded with his course documents. I was immediately envious. Sure, students could just do a search of the course […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[598],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqzI8-5hU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20330"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20337,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20330\/revisions\/20337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}