Quickstart Tutorial

Let's create a new bot in less than 5 minutes.

Build a Marcus Aurelius philosophy bot

For this demo we'll create a Marcus Aurelius philosophy bot based on his book Meditations and a short Wikipedia summary.

info

Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD and a Stoic philosopher.

1. Login to create a blank bot

Get started by logging in to Mottle with your Google, Microsoft or Github account.

Logging in will automatically create a new blank bot, called MottleBot. We'll change the name in the next step.

2. Customize your bot

Navigate to your Bot's setting page.

Here you can tweak certain settings:

• Your bot's name:

  MarcusBot

• Your bot's personality:

  You are Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher.

• Some "sticky context":

  You are instructing philosophy students in the year 2023. Explain concepts using modern language.

• A failure message:

  I will need to consider that.

3. Add your data

The data for this bot will comprise of:

1. the full text of the Meditations book, as well as
2. some basic facts about Marcus summarized from his Wikipedia article.

Navigate to your bot's Knowledge Base.

Add full text of Meditations

Click on the green Upload TXT button. (On mobile devices this will appear as a green button with an icon containing a document with an up arrow.)

Copy and paste the entire text of the Meditations book and click Save. This will automatically split the text into snippets.

Add Wikipedia facts

Click on the blue + New Snippet button. (On mobile devices this will appear as + New.)

Add the title: About Marcus Aurelius

Add the content:

-Marcus Aurelius was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD and a Stoic philosopher
-He was the last of the rulers known as the Five Good Emperors
-He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161
-He was born to the emperor's nephew, Marcus Annius Verus, and the heiress Domitia Calvilla
-He married Antoninus' daughter Faustina in 145
-He reigned alongside his adoptive brother, Lucius Verus
-He modified the silver purity of the Roman currency, the denarius
-The Antonine Plague broke out in 165 or 166 and devastated the population of the Roman Empire
-He chose not to adopt an heir
-The Column and Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius still stand in Rome
-Meditations are a significant source of the modern understanding of ancient Stoic philosophy

tip

Since snippets contents are limited to 1400 characters + 100 characters for a title, it's good practice to summarize large amounts of text using something like ChatGPT to boil down key information to bullet points.

Click Save.

Your bot is now ready!

4. Query your bot

Go to the Test Your Bot page and enter some test queries:

• What makes for a good life?
• How can I be less anxious?
• How should we raise children?

Now try asking the bot a trickier question:

• When were you born?

We haven't actually added this information to our bot, so you should receive your failure message back (if you copied the failure message above, this should be I will need to consider that.)

5. Debug answers

You can debug your queries by going to the Debug Answers screen. Here you'll see each of your most recent queries, along with the snippets that were used to answer the questions.

Try going back to the Knowledge Base and adding a document that answers the birth question:

Title: When were you born?

Content: Marcus Aurelius was born on 26 April 121 in Rome, Italy

Save the document, and then try the query When were you born? again. You should now receive the correct answer.

6. Delete your bot

Once you've finished playing with your bot go to the Settings page and under "Danger Zone" click "Delete this bot".

Once the bot is deleted, you'll have a new blank bot you can work with.

danger

Deleting your bot will immediately delete all snippets and query logs. This cannot be undone.

What's Next?

Why not integrate your bot into Slack, a Facebook Page, Discord, Microsoft Teams or Email.