✨ Announcing Chatbots: Create, train and share

[ashrafsam]

Today we’re announcing a small milestone towards a bigger product our team has initiated a couple of weeks ago.

Say hi to Chatbots in your dashboard

The current BETA version of the Activepieces chatbots lets you:

• Create a bot on top of GPT 3.5 Turbo.
• Dictate how it should respond (the same way you prompt GPT).
• Upload PDF files as data sources for the chatbot to use while responding.
• Share the chat interface link with your team (logged in or public) to chat with the bot.
• Ask questions to the bot in your Activepieces flows instead of using the agnostic ChatGPT piece.

Chatbots are available on both the open source and the cloud editions.

1. Create a new chatbot

Go to the Chatbots page in your dashboard, click on Create Chatbot to build your first bot.

2. Brand and train your chatbot

Go to the Chatbots page in your dashboard, click on Create Chatbot to build your first bot.

3. Chat with your bot

Once you are done with the branding and training of your chatbot, click on Chat with bot to see how it responds.

My bot will answer questions about Posthog’s company values (I downloaded that page as a PDF document and uploaded it as a data source).

If the bot is public, you can share the link with your team and they don’t have to login in order to access the bot page and chat with it.

4. Call the chatbot within your flow

You no longer have to use the business agnostic ChatGPT action in your Activepieces flows. Instead, you can train your own bot and call it within your flow.

For example, you can create a bot that writes with your own style and trained on your data, then generate blogs and post them to your site.

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Why Activepieces + Bots?

The vast majority of our users are using LLMs in their flows. To make AI more powerful to everyone, it’s very important to customize it independently to fit the nature of the automations you’re creating.

This is our vision for the Activepieces Chatbots:

• Chatbots can be trained on valuable data sources. Since we’re a connectivity company, we’ll be building with the community connectors with their most important data sources (think Notion, Google Drive, Airtable and more).

• Chatbots shall become capable. We’d like to see these chatbots capable of making decisions and acting autonomously by giving them access to certain flows in your Activepieces account.

• Chatbots are the brain of your flows. You can create a chatbot that can think and return a conclusion, then call it within your flow and complete the automation according to the conclusion made by the bot.

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What would you like to see next in Activepieces Chatbots?

[axgr]

Fantastic addition. Huge thank you to the team for shipping this! Is there a way to continuously train the bot with new training data, for example as part of a flow?

[Rustproof]

This is such a great idea! I already tested the feature yesterday - intuitive and easy to use. It would be great to be able to use URLs as training data, ideally with support for XML sitemaps.

[anrikaz]

I never thought workflow automation could have Chatbot features, but I was pleasantly surprised when I tried it and saw its potential. Great work, Activepieces team!

[Amer]

I love it!
Can we choose the infrastructure to train the bot?
On top of Chatgpt or Jasper?

[karla]

So just to confirm: What would be the benefits of the bot over ChatGPT? (Aside from the fact that ChatGPT is not free)

[thisthatjosh]

You are also using chatgpt with this. The logical benefits is to allow site visitors to interact with your site via bot. For example, on my news site, the bot has been trained on each article ever written. Now, a visitor can ask the bot a question, and that question should return based on the previous articles written on the site.

It could also be used to discuss what sizes shirts are available in a specific color on a clothing site based on the last upload of the pdf. Evenetually, this is likely to be live and dynamic.

[LelandBest]

Great addition! As someone who’s been working with bots for almost a year now, I’d love to see you guys go all the way with the training features. I’m already using bots with several other methods behind this madness…

[GunnerJnr]

I think a big feature would be that if you were perhaps making these for a client and wanted to white label it. You would want a way for them to access it without the ActivePieces bar at the top. (Not that I am against recognition for your guy’s amazing work, of course.), but from a business perspective, if you didn’t want to give away the tools of the trade, a white-label option would be awesome.

Also, the ability to perhaps create them as embeddable widgets on people’s websites, and maybe the ability to design the bot with customisations, logos, and a settings area so they can enter their own API key, etc.

Awesome work, though; I am looking forward to these.

[thisthatjosh]

This I agree with 110011000%

[ashrafsam]

Fantastic addition. Huge thank you to the team for shipping this! Is there a way to continuously train the bot with new training data, for example as part of a flow?

Thanks @axgr We haven’t thought about this yet. We’ll have to put a feature request page to see how appealing each idea is to the users. It sounds interesting to me though.

This is such a great idea! I already tested the feature yesterday - intuitive and easy to use. It would be great to be able to use URLs as training data, ideally with support for XML sitemaps.

@Rustproof This should be on the way, we know that training on website content is super important for chatbots. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

I never thought workflow automation could have Chatbot features, but I was pleasantly surprised when I tried it and saw its potential. Great work, Activepieces team!

@anrikaz Thank you! Looking forward to your feedback on it.

I love it!
Can we choose the infrastructure to train the bot?
On top of Chatgpt or Jasper?

@Amer Thank you! I’m not sure which LLM model Jasper uses in the backend, they mention that GPT is part of it but I can’t know for sure what they use.

Regarding other LLMs as the base to our chatbots, it’s something we’d like to consider in the future but we’d like to:

1. See user demand for it.
2. Find LLMs that can be really compared to GPT in conversation quality.

So just to confirm: What would be the benefits of the bot over ChatGPT? (Aside from the fact that ChatGPT is not free)

@karla At its simplest form, you can store a prompt in this bot and share it with someone. For example, you can ask the bot to be funny and share the link with your friends. There are so many use cases that go beyond this like setting the tone and data for applications built on top of these chatbots as I listed in the original announcement.

Please note that you need to connect your OpenAI account using the API key, so cost is not a competitive advantage of our chatbots over ChatGPT.

You are also using chatgpt with this. The logical benefits is to allow site visitors to interact with your site via bot. For example, on my news site, the bot has been trained on each article ever written. Now, a visitor can ask the bot a question, and that question should return based on the previous articles written on the site.

It could also be used to discuss what sizes shirts are available in a specific color on a clothing site based on the last upload of the pdf. Evenetually, this is likely to be live and dynamic.

@thisthatjosh Exactly. What you mentioned revolves around having more “data sources” which will grow as we go, and having a Javascript widget for website, which we don’t yet have. But that’s aligned with what we imagine too.

Great addition! As someone who’s been working with bots for almost a year now, I’d love to see you guys go all the way with the training features. I’m already using bots with several other methods behind this madness…

@LelandBest Which tool is this? What’s Content as a data source? And what files are allowed other than PDFs? Thanks for sharing!

I think a big feature would be that if you were perhaps making these for a client and wanted to white label it. You would want a way for them to access it without the ActivePieces bar at the top. (Not that I am against recognition for your guy’s amazing work, of course.), but from a business perspective, if you didn’t want to give away the tools of the trade, a white-label option would be awesome.

Also, the ability to perhaps create them as embeddable widgets on people’s websites, and maybe the ability to design the bot with customisations, logos, and a settings area so they can enter their own API key, etc.

Awesome work, though; I am looking forward to these.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts @GunnerJnr These are 2 great ideas. We’d love to see them as Feature Requests and see how many users demand them. They make sense to me but voting helps us with our internal prioritization!

[GunnerJnr]

@ashrafsam

Thanks for sharing your thoughts @GunnerJnr These are 2 great ideas. We’d love to see them as Feature Requests and see how many users demand them. They make sense to me but voting helps us with our internal prioritization!

@ashrafsam Done - Chatbots - 1. White Label, 2. Custom Design, 3. Additional Action for Training Data, 4. Documentation

Get voting peeps!

[_y_b]

Hello
Part of my activity is based on paid chatbot service which has 2 very important feature for me, specialy in the context of generative text
1/ capable of citing source of information (where is it that you found the information you giving me back). Why this is important? a) make the information “confirmed to be correct” b) provide the context where information is taken from, and make clear to which extent this information is available.
2/ the ability to connect knowledge where it exists already: wikis (URL), notion, gdrive. If you’re like me, all activities already have their spot where they sit:gdrive, notion, etc. It would be an incredible engine of interaction with disseminated knowledge to make queries for all of them at once.
(I know active pieces already have access to most, so why not?)

[xavier]

I am an AppSumo License Tier 3 member, and it says that I have maxed out my bots at 1, asks me to upgrade and brings me to a 404 page. I would like unlimited bots and access to this feature that gives me more than a single bot. Is there any way to add these features for your sumolings? Thanks!

[Ash]

@xavier

AppSumo License Tier 3

I find having access to only 1 bot to be very restrictive. Would love to hear their thoughts on this matter.

[Ash]

Anyone?

This doesn’t seem like a good way to reward people who have invested early in your platform

[ashrafsam]

An update regarding chatbots: We’re considering sunsetting this product as you can now create custom GPTs on OpenAI directly. You can upload files there and give custom instructions and then use them through Activepieces (once we update the OpenAI piece).

Also given our slow progress on this product, this way we can stay less distracted.

What does everyone think here? @here

[Dennis]

This seems like the perfect solution. The chatbots felt a bit off-brand to me and almost like a completely different service, especially since they were separate from the current licenses. It shifted the focus towards something that might be original, but not really the core of Activepieces.

[Grant_Faucher]

I came across Zapier’s new chatbot feature in this video. It looks incredible and is highly useful with the embed feature to put it on a live website. Maybe reconsider chatbots or take a different approach. Having an OpenAI direct integration would be great, but I think the user experience shown in the video is great and beneficial by being able to use the chatbot not only internally but also allow external users visiting your website to access Active Pieces automations. Maybe there is some middle ground between the solutions. https://youtu.be/Et-HZDxr72k?feature=shared&t=137

[Michael_ES]

How is the ability to use custom GPT’s coming along? How is it going to be implemented? Will there be additional options?