An AI chatbot in Social Intents answers visitor questions using ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, trained on your own website and documents. It works alongside your live chat: the bot answers instantly, around the clock, and hands off to your team when a human is needed. This guide takes you from zero to a working, trained, tested chatbot. For a product overview, see ChatGPT chatbot for your website.
How the Pieces Fit Together
Everything lives in the widget workspace: go to Chat Widgets and select your widget. The workspace has four tabs: Settings, AI Agent, Playground and Deploy. The AI Agent tab has its own left menu: Agent settings, Handoff, Data sources, Q&A, Improve and Actions.
| Where | What you do there |
|---|---|
| AI Agent > Agent settings | Turn the AI on, choose when it responds, pick the provider and model, and set the display name, greeting and AI disclaimer. |
| AI Agent > Handoff | Set the trigger phrases and messages that hand a chat to your team, and what happens when the AI has no answer. |
| Data sources, Q&A, Improve | The Knowledge page. Train the bot on website pages, sitemaps and files, write exact Q&A answers, and fix answers visitors rated down. |
| Playground | Write the AI instructions, tune the response style, and test conversations before visitors see them. |
Step 1: Enable the AI Agent
Open the AI Agent Tab
Go to Chat Widgets, select your widget, and click the AI Agent tab. If AI is not set up yet, you see Turn on AI for this widget: pick a provider to start.
Turn It On and Choose When It Responds
In Agent settings, switch the AI agent toggle on and choose an option under When the AI responds: AI only, AI + human agents on all chats, AI + human agents, AI drops when an agent answers, AI answers missed chats, AI answers when your team is offline, or AI answers offline or missed chats.
Choose Provider and Model
Under Provider & credentials, pick ChatGPT (OpenAI), Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini or Google Vertex AI, then a model. GPT-6 Luna is the default. GPT-6 Luna, GPT-5.6 Luna, GPT-4o and GPT-4o Mini are included with your subscription, so no API key is needed. Every other model (for example GPT-5.6, GPT-5.6 Terra, Claude Sonnet 5 or Gemini 3 Pro) runs on your own provider API key, which you paste in the API key field in the same card. Not sure which engine? See Choosing Your AI Engine.
Set the Bot Identity
Give the bot a Display name visitors will see, an optional Greeting message with Starting quick replies, and an optional AI disclaimer that tells visitors they are talking to an AI. Many teams are required to disclose this - see Visitor Privacy and Consent. Click Save changes in the bar at the bottom of the page.
Step 2: Train It on Your Content
Open Data Sources
In the AI Agent tab, click Data sources in the left menu. This opens the Knowledge page, the bot's library - it can only answer from what you put here.
Add Sources
Use the add tabs: Add Website crawls your site from a starting URL, Add Page grabs a single URL, Add Sitemap imports every URL in an XML sitemap, and Upload File accepts PDF, Word, text, HTML or Excel documents, or a CSV of URLs to import in bulk.
Train
Click Train All to train new web pages and sitemaps. Uploaded documents train automatically. After content changes, retrain a single source with its Train button.
Full details, including what trains well and what does not: Training Your Chatbot on Your Content.
Step 3: Instruct and Tune in the Playground
Open the Playground Tab
The Playground shows a live test chat next to the AI panel, which holds AI Instructions and Model & response style (temperature and max tokens), with a summary of the knowledge the bot is trained on.
Write the Instructions
Tell the bot who it is, what it should and should not do, and how to respond. Start from the Template menu (Customer support agent, Sales assistant, Lead qualification, Product specialist) or write your own:
"You are the support assistant for Acme Software. Answer using only the provided knowledge. Be concise and friendly. If you do not know the answer, or the visitor asks for a human, offer to connect them with the team."
A full guide with templates: Writing Effective System Instructions.
Test and Iterate
Ask the questions your customers actually ask - pricing, refunds, setup, edge cases. Adjust instructions or add knowledge, then ask again. Click Save & restart chat to apply your changes to the live bot and start a fresh test conversation.
Step 4: Configure Human Handoff
In the AI Agent tab, open Handoff. Enter the Trigger phrases that hand a chat to your team (such as "talk to a human, agent") and the Escalation response the visitor sees, then set up When the AI has no answer. Escalations reach your Inbox and your connected Teams, Slack, Google Chat, Zoom or Webex channel. Test the phrase "talk to a human" end to end. Complete guide: Setting Up Escalation to Human Agents.
Step 5: Go Live and Watch Week One
- Verify the widget is installed (install guide, or copy the code from the Deploy tab) and the bot responds on your site.
- Read the first week of transcripts in Analyze - every wrong or missing answer is a training gap you can close in minutes.
- Turn on Also collect thumbs up / down on AI answers (Settings tab > Feedback form), then use Improve in the AI Agent menu to turn thumbs-down feedback into corrected Q&A. See Improving Response Quality.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need my own OpenAI or Anthropic API key?
Not for GPT-6 Luna (the default), GPT-5.6 Luna, GPT-4o or GPT-4o Mini. They run on the key included with your subscription. Other ChatGPT models and every Claude and Gemini model need your own provider API key, entered under Provider & credentials in the AI Agent tab. If a model needs a key and none is saved, the page tells you before you save.
How long does training take?
Single pages and files finish in seconds to minutes. Large site crawls depend on page count - a few hundred pages typically completes within minutes.
Can the bot answer questions outside my content?
By default it should decline and offer a handoff - that behavior comes from your instructions. Explicitly telling it to answer only from provided knowledge prevents invented answers.
Can I run the bot only outside business hours?
Yes. Set When the AI responds to AI answers when your team is offline (or AI answers offline or missed chats) so humans take chats during the day and the bot covers nights and weekends. See Online Schedule vs Manual Status.