[HN Gopher] Show HN: HelpHub - GPT chatbot for any site
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Show HN: HelpHub - GPT chatbot for any site
Hi HN, I'm the founder of a SaaS platform called CommandBar (YC
S20). We've been mucking around with AI-related side quests for a
while, but recently got excited enough about one to test it with
some customers. Results were surprisingly good so we decided to
launch it. HelpHub is AI chat + semantic search for any website or
web app. You can add source content in 3 ways: -Crawling any
public site via a URL (e.g. your marketing site or blog) -Syncing
with a CMS (like Zendesk or Intercom) -Add content manually The
chatbot is then "trained" on that content and will answer
question's based on that content only, not referencing directly the
knowledge. The output is an embeddable widget the contains two
things: the chatbot interface for user's to ask questions, and a
search interface for users to search through the content the bot is
trained on directly (as well as view source content). You can play
around with a demo on some popular sites here:
https://helphub.commandbar.com Some features we added that make it
better IMO than just chat: -Suggested questions (based on the page
the user is on and their chat history) -Suggested follow-up
questions in a chat response -Ask a question about a specific doc
-Recommend content based on who the user is and where they are
Would love to hear feedback (not lost on me that there are other
chatgpt-for-your-site products and we are probably missing a ton of
functionality from there) and can also share details about how we
built this. It's not rocket science but does feel magic :) -James
Author : dazzeloid
Score : 96 points
Date : 2023-05-24 12:29 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (helphub.commandbar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (helphub.commandbar.com)
| ishjindal wrote:
| How is it different from https://admin.hellotars.com/ai?
| tkainrad wrote:
| Without knowing that product well, I think the main difference
| is that HelpHub is not just a ChatBot. It's also a full in-app
| help center with semantic search etc. The ChatBot integrates
| with the rest of the features and among other things links you
| to the sources it used to generate the answers.
| thih9 wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| How do you approach handling sensitive data that might come from
| a CMS in an AI context?
|
| Both: 1. Sensitive data being surfaced accidentally during
| regular conversation and 2. Malicious actors using prompt
| injection or similar techniques?
| dazzeloid wrote:
| For CMS's we built custom integrations (not just a generic
| crawler) that strips out obviously sensitive info like internal
| notes to support people.
|
| Nothing revolutionary to report on the prompt injection stuff.
| Most people using HH are using it for public documentation so
| there really isn't any info in the source content that couldn't
| be surfaced in an answer.
| dylanz wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! How does this differ from something like
| Fin from Intercom? https://www.intercom.com/fin
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Any plans for a Discord bot?
| dazzeloid wrote:
| Not currently but would be pretty easy with our API. Just a
| different UI.
| thepaulthomson wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Super speedy setup and loved the Strava
| example!
|
| What do you have on the roadmap for upcoming features? Is there
| anything you're particularly excited about adding?
| dazzeloid wrote:
| Wrote about a few things here:
| https://www.commandbar.com/blog/why-we-built-helphub
|
| There are so many low-hanging fruit: -Edit the system prompt
| -Shape common answers -Give bot access to actions so it can act
| like ChatGPT with plugins
| pech0rin wrote:
| Tested out the landing page chatbot and got one "We couldnt find
| an answer to your question" and another request timeout. Not
| confident at all using this with any product.
| melvinmelih wrote:
| Well, what do you expect from a product that is put together as
| a AI-related side quest :)
| dazzeloid wrote:
| it's a main quest now!!
| dazzeloid wrote:
| Oops looking into it. Do you remember which bot you used and
| what question you asked?
| AugurCognito wrote:
| Same issue here, toggled ai chats only and selected one of
| the default questions, maybe api met hn hug of death(?)
| dazzeloid wrote:
| Wahhh. Strava example?
| AugurCognito wrote:
| After some digging I discovered something. This error
| happens when occurrence API returns 400 Bad Request
| error. This led me to identify two scenarios in which it
| can happen:
|
| 1. When a query is sent while another query is being
| processed, it consistently triggers a 400 bad request
| error. Subsequent queries also yield the same error code.
|
| 2. Although less common, random queries can sometimes
| result in a Bad Request error. I do not know how helpful
| this information is, but I can provide the chat_id
| associated with the instance:
| 677cfad3-5084-40d0-81d0-08592b5927f5.
| vayyala wrote:
| Great catch - should be fixed now!
| tkainrad wrote:
| What I like most about this is that it's not just a chatbot but
| rather a full in-app help center with a chatbot built-in.
| mkw5053 wrote:
| I made a much crappier, little personal project with similar
| goals: https://github.com/mkwatson/chat_any_site
| frabjoused wrote:
| Why does this homepage spike my CPU?
| dazzeloid wrote:
| Lotties :sweat
| tommoor wrote:
| I think it's a good idea and someone will see success here,
| unfortunately it's far too slow to be useful right now (HN
| effect?)
| dazzeloid wrote:
| HN has slowed it down a bit but speed is definitely not where I
| want it to be. A lot of that comes from the openai side atm.
| Just turned on caching for the suggested questions so at least
| those are extremely fast.
| nkozyra wrote:
| How much future planning do you do around the whole "Don't
| build your business on top of another business?" axiom?
|
| I realize this is just one part of your product, but what if
| OpenAI goes away (not directly, but effectively)? Is there a
| contingency plan to move to another LLM? Build something
| else?
| arberx wrote:
| What's the difference between helphub and
| https://www.chatbase.co/?
| dazzeloid wrote:
| I'm not super familiar with chatbase (which looks awesome in
| its own right). Some things that I haven't seen before:
| -Semantic search added -Ability to open source docs in the
| widget -Recommendation sets -Personalized suggested question
|
| Also we're pretty focused on embedded use cases and looks like
| chatbase is more generically usable (e.g. on discord, via API).
|
| But honestly, I expect these products (including our own) to
| grow so much over the next few months than this answer could
| totally change.
| ativzzz wrote:
| One is VC funded
| fakedang wrote:
| One is YC funded
| mritchie712 wrote:
| I'm all for "charge more", but these two restriction on a $249 a
| month plan seem nuts:
|
| - 20 Commands
|
| - "Powered By" Branding
|
| After paying over $100 a month, it's unusual to keep your
| branding and a limit of 20 commands seems to defeat the purpose
| of the product.
| tommoor wrote:
| $20m in funding, so lets say a $100m post-money valuation -
| probably need at least 10k sites running this at $250/mo for
| that valuation to stack up.
| dazzeloid wrote:
| That pricing is for our whole product, which includes more than
| just Helphub.
|
| For HH only we have a free tier with 2k messages / mo and a $50
| tier for 10k messages a month.
|
| https://www.commandbar.com/pricing-helphub
| [deleted]
| jonahx wrote:
| I've wanted a product like this since I first encountered
| chatGPT.
|
| How do you handle curation? Meaning... if the model picks up some
| out of date info or misinterprets it, and a human admin notices
| that and wants to mark something as out of date or wrong, can
| they? I see this as similar to the way I can correct ChatGPT over
| the course of a chat session, and it will remember the
| corrections.
| dazzeloid wrote:
| If we're doing our job right then HH should only be answering
| based on its source content (and not background knowledge). So
| bad answers coming from incorrect source content would need to
| be corrected in the source content. Citations should help with
| this, e.g. as a human admit, review answer -> notice it's bad
| -> click citation -> locate incorrect part -> change it.
|
| Also thinking about ways to ensure the bot answers common
| questions correctly while still being able to personalize
| responses. Working on something called "answer shaping" where
| an admin can write out a response and tag with the question it
| responds to. Then the bot would first check to see if the human
| question matches a cached question, and if so would prioritize
| using info in the cached answer in its response. Seems like
| this can give the bot freedom to personalize the answer but
| make sure it includes the right stuff.
| jonahx wrote:
| > e.g. as a human admit, review answer -> notice it's bad ->
| click citation -> locate incorrect part -> change it.
|
| I understand why you want the flow to work this way (single
| source of truth, fix things at the root, simplifies
| everything), but, respectfully, it is really bad from a UX
| perspective. Here are the _main_ reasons:
|
| 1. Not all admins will have the ability to edit all source
| pages. Both from a permissions perspective (eg, a zendesk
| ticket or slack message created by someone else) or a
| technical ability perspective (eg, you need to edit html and
| create a PR).
|
| 2. People are busy and lazy. If I can see the problem in the
| answer, notice it's wrong, and _correct it right now on the
| page where I see it_ , I will. Otherwise, I often won't.
| Think busy CS agents, developers in the midst of problem
| solving, etc.
|
| Yes, supporting this workflow makes life harder on you,
| because it's technically more complex, but it's the way
| people will want to use this product.
| dazzeloid wrote:
| I guess my concern is being a system of adjusted record on
| top of a system of record. Wouldn't it be a cluster if
| changes are being made to docs in CommandBar but not
| [Zendesk]?
|
| That said maybe there's room to store bot-specific stuff in
| CB. For example, tagging passages with "exclude this from
| training data" if they're causing bad answers for some
| reason.
| jonahx wrote:
| Indeed, it will be a total cluster.
|
| From a pure engineering perspective, it is obviously the
| wrong solution, and your initial suggestion is the right
| one.
|
| Yet....
|
| I strongly predict that the forces of market demand and
| human behavior will push your product inexorably in this
| direction.
| kukkukb wrote:
| When the end user asks a question, is it sent to OpenAI? Or is
| this an LLM you built yourself?
| dazzeloid wrote:
| Right now it's hitting OpenAI, but we want to try out other
| LLMs in the future.
| nutanc wrote:
| One thing I always hated about chatbot sites when they were the
| craze and the the AI help bot sites now is the fact that these
| sites do no provide a chatbot for their own site. I mean, why
| isn't there a CommandBar for commandbar.com?
|
| I actually see that commandbar.com has an intercom chat widget.
| colecut wrote:
| Intercom chat is better if you have the resources to support
| it.
|
| AI is then theoretically the next best thing.
| JshWright wrote:
| Can the chat be handed off to a human seamlessly in the event the
| bot can't answer the question?
| dazzeloid wrote:
| Not yet but this has come up a lot so thinking about it. We
| probably don't want to build our own human ticketing system so
| the clearest path would be to have an entrypoint to kick the
| user over to something like intercom and maybe provide the
| context of the AI conversation as history in that interface.
| Not ideal to have two chat interfaces tho :/
|
| Ideally we could be the UI layer for intercom, zendesk, etc. We
| already do that for docs search / exploration.
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(page generated 2023-05-24 23:02 UTC)