Building a chatbot is easy; building a helpful chatbot is the real challenge.
We’re built on WordPress, so naturally, we use a WordPress plugin. We chose WPBot.
It’s incredibly easy to set up. Unfortunately, making it truly helpful for visitors to BIZ . BIO is more challenging... especially when weighing cost versus results.
To explain: there’s only so much we can do with manual scripting. The idea is to provide hundreds of Q&As that we anticipate users might ask a chatbot. The problem is that accuracy can be questionable.
A better approach is to use LLM APIs - such as
@ChatGPTapp by OpenAI or
@Gemini. The downside? Cost. These services charge per query, and that adds up quickly.
As we bootstrap, our primary choice is manual scripting.
It serves its purpose, but it's not highly effective. Still, it's sufficient - for now.
#buildinpublic