Chatbase

Ever since ChatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022, a lot of people have been asking about ways to create their own ChatGPT - one that knows their information, speaks in their style and hosted on their own website.

We're not quite there yet in realizing the full dream, but we can get two out of the three: Chatbase lets you create your own chatbot based on your company's information and hosted on your website.

The major use case for this is customer support. Someone has a question about who you are, what you do or how your product works, and you want to give them a way to answer their questions self-serve.

How Chatbase works

First, you pick out a set of information that you want your chatbot to understand. This can be anything:

• one or more PDFs
• a website (that Chatbase will crawl)
• freeform text

You'll then customize the look and feel of the chatbot: what it should say at the start, logo, colors, etc. Then, you can copy a piece of code and embed it onto your website.

From then, when you visit your website, there will be a little chat window on the bottom-left that prompts incoming users to chat with the bot.

On the backend, Chatbase basically sliced up your text. When a customer asks a question, Chatbase is looking for the most relevant slice, then pinging ChatGPT to answer the question given the information in the slice.

That's important to know because it means Chatbase won't be good at questions that deal with the whole document. This is basically the same situation as ChatPDF.

Simple and gets the job done

We're recommending Chatbase because it's a simple product that solves a need and that seems to be working well for its customers. We don't know if this is the future of customer support, but we do know that more and more people want self-serve options. If they can get that with Chatbase, then that's important.