==//== Hello, how are you? I'm good, thanks! Great to have you here, building your first Mottle chatbot. ==//== What is Mottle? Mottle is a tool for building expressive ChatGPT-like chatbots using your own data. For example, you could build a customer service bot, or an internal knowledge bot trained on technical information. It's very easy to get started, all you need to do is drag your documents onto the "Train Your Bot" page. ==//== What do I need to do? You can use this tool to build your bot, which you can later share with other people, either by our API, or by embedding your bot on your website. ==//== How was DemoBot trained? I am a simple bot that was trained using the DemoBot.txt file that you will find on the “Train Your Bot” page. You can delete this file whenever you’d like, and start building your own bot. Until then, feel free to ask me any questions. ==//== What is DemoBot’s personality? I have been given the following personality: “You're a friendly welcome bot for Mottle, teaching users how to use the system.” Ordinarily I wouldn’t give up this information, however, you’re just learning and so I’ve been instructed I can tell you this. ==//== What is DemoBot’s sticky context? I have been given the following personality: “Mottle is a chatbot creation tool. It allows users to create a chatbot from their existing documentation by simply uploading files. Mottle then scans these files and presents relevant ‘snippets’ to ChatGPT at query time.” Ordinarily I wouldn’t give up this information, however, you’re just learning and so I’ve been instructed I can tell you this. ==//== Where should I set my bot's name, personality, sticky context and failure message? Do my uploaded files indicate the personality and behavior of my bot? You can change your bot's personality, sticky context and failure message on the Bot's Settings page. However, yes, your uploaded docs may influence your bot's personality and behavior. Be mindful of how your documents are drafted. The contents of your documents is what your bot "knows". It will use that information accordingly. ==//== How should I get started? Building a bot takes a little bit of trial and error. The first step might be to upload a few of your existing documents to get a feel of how your bot will use the information to construct its answers. After this, you will want to curate some information so that your bot can provide the best possible answers. I would encourage you to start testing your bot with real users as quickly as possible. You will see their questions on the "Debug answers" page, and you can then start to add more relevant information to better serve these queries. ==//== How does Mottle work? Behind the scenes Mottle is using ChatGPT to construct the answers. However, Mottle prompts ChatGPT in such a way that we limit answers to the information you've provided your bot. When a query comes in, we search across all your data, and provide extracts of most relevant information to ChatGPT. It then responds using that information as its sole source of truth. Thus, it's important to provide high quality information to your bot. As they say, "garbage in, garbage out." ==//== Where does Mottle store my data? Is it stored in ChatGPT or OpenAI? When your bot isn't being used, Mottle stores your data on servers controlled by Mottle in Google’s Cloud Platform. When a user sends your bot a query, we quickly search through all of your data to find the best information to send to OpenAI to construct the answer and send it back to the user. This design has been chosen to limit the chance of ChatGPT "hallucinating" fake information. ==//== What can I do on the free plan? The free plan includes 30 queries per month, and a generous allowance of up to 500 "snippets". This is enough space for roughly 60% of a Harry Potter novel. This should allow you to test all of the functions of Mottle, including embedding a widget on your website if you wish, or linking your bot to, say, Slack, via Zapier. ==//== How do I train my bot? To train your bot, simply drag and drop files on the "Train Your Bot" page. Common formats are accepted: .pdf, .doc, .docx, .txt, etc. If you're starting from scratch, we would recommend a .txt file. Ideally you want the information to be written from the perspective of your bot, but you could also just experiment with uploading whatever information you have available to see how your bot deals with it. A good first step might be to upload some FAQs from your website. ==//== What file formats do you support to train a bot? Mottle supports the following file formats for training your bot: .txt, .pdf, .html, .doc, .docx, .pptx, .odt, .rtf, .ps, .eml, .epup, .png, .gif, .jpg, .tiff. Note that while Mottle can read image files, and will attempt OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on them, Mottle can't "understand" the visual elements of an image. Nor will the images be served to your users. Mottle does not support markdown files (.md) at this time. We recommend a pure .txt file instead. ==//== Does Mottle support audio or video files for training a bot? No, at this time, as Mottle is purely text based, we do not support audio or video files. However, you could transcript your audio or video files and upload the transcripts. ==//== Does Mottle support markdown (.md) for training a bot? No, Mottle does not support markdown files at this time. We recommend a pure .txt file instead. ==//== What can I do with my bot once it's trained? Once your bot is trained you can interact with it via our API, or use our pre-built HTML embed tool to place it on your website. Go to the "Share Your Bot" page to learn more. ==//== How much does Mottle cost? There are three plans available: Hobby ($49/mth), Pro ($149/mth) and Business ($499/mth). These tiers allow you to build more bots with greater storage capacity. To upgrade, click on your profile picture in the top right of the screen to open the account settings menu and then click "Upgrade". What features do the paid tiers include? - Hobby tier ($49/month): Up to 2 bots, Up to 2,000 snippets per bot (=2,000 queries per month shared across both bots), API access & website embed - Pro tier ($149/month): Up to 5 bots, Up to 5,000 snippets per bot (=10,000 queries per month shared across all 5 bots), API access & website embed - Business tier ($449/month): Up to 10 bots, Up to 15,000 snippets per bot (=50,000 queries per month shared across all 10 bots), API access & website embed There is no need to display the Mottle logo when embedding your bot on a website when you’re on a paid tier. All prices are in USD. ==//== What are some ideas for chatbots I can build with Mottle? Product expert bot: Train your bot on technical information about your products. Customer service bot: Train your bot on common customer Q&As. Internal knowledge base bot: Help your staff quickly answer their questions. A personal journaling bot: Each snippet would be a journal entry, and then you can ask yourself questions. Study bot: Load your study notes and chat to your new study companion. Ask a famous person: Train a bot on the writings of historical figures, such as Marcus Aurelius. ==//== How do I ring fence my bot to stay within certain guidelines? Mottle instructs ChatGPT to only construct answers from the information you provide. Generally speaking, this method will mean your bot shouldn’t “hallucinate” (i.e. make up) information, and will stay on script. If it can't find the answer in your information it will say your "failure message", for example, "I don't know that yet." You can configure your failure message on the settings page. ==//== Do you have a quickstart guide / tutorial? Yes, you can find it here: https://docs.mottle.com ==//== How do I integrate my bot into Slack, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Messenger, Discord or email? You can find instructions on how to integrate your bot into third party tools on our documentation website: https://docs.mottle.com. Note, at the moment you will need a paid Zapier account to do this. However, Zapier does offer a free trial. ==//== What are the limitations of Mottle? Mottle doesn’t work well at the moment where dates or chronology are important. For example, something that happened 3 weeks ago may be presented as happening "today" by your bot. Mottle doesn’t work well where the overall comprehension of a document is important – for example, a lawyer might read an entire piece of legislation and be able to answer general questions about the approach of the legislation, Mottle can’t do that, because it’s only retrieving small chunks of a document at query time. To achieve this in Mottle you would want to provide these high level summaries in addition to the document itself. ==//== Where does Mottle work well? Mottle works well where your documents capture knowledge in a timeless way (i.e. not dependent on dates) Examples of things that will work well: Q&As, i.e. common customer questions, technical documentation, training docs, product manuals, policy documents, HR handbooks, etc. ==//== What are the benefits of using Mottle? The main benefit of using Mottle is that your users won't need to read lengthy documents to find answers, but can instead just ask questions in natural language. This is a much more pleasant user experience and will help them save time (and money). ==//== What languages does Mottle work in? Mottle works in any language supported by OpenAI. OpenAI will automatically translate between languages at query time when appropriate. For example, if your knowledge base is in English, and a user asks a question in Korean, the answer will likely come back in Korean, even though you didn’t add any Korean information to your training set. ==//== Do you have a free account? What are the conditions of the free account? You can create a bot with up to 500 "snippets" to test, with a very small number of included queries. If you don't use your bot within any 7 day period, it will be automatically deleted. ==//== What is a "snippet"? A snippet is a piece of text that you can use to train your bot. For example, you might have a snippet explaining your refund policy. At this time a snippet can be up to 450 OpenAI "tokens" — which is approx 1,800 characters of English text. The number of snippets you can have in your account will depend on the plan you select. ==//== What about UTF-8 characters and spaces? Do they count as tokens? Non-English characters may count as more than 1 token. Spaces may also be counted as a token, or not. For more information about what counts as a token, please refer to the OpenAI documentation. They have a "Tokenizer" tool on their website where you can paste some data in and see how many tokens it consumes. ==//== What's the maximum amount of data (characters/tokens/words) you can store in Mottle? Our largest standard plan - the Pro tier - includes 5 bots, with each bot able to store 5,000 snippets. If each snippet contains 1,800 English characters = 9 million characters. If we assume 6 characters per word, that's 1.5 million words per bot. Therefore, a Pro tier account, with 5 bots can store a total of 1.5 millions words x 5 bots = roughly 7.5 million words of English across all 5 bots. If you need more storage space than the Pro tier, please contact us for a custom plan. ==//== How would my customers interact with my bot? You could place your bot on your website, or use our API to integrate with services such as Slack, Microsoft Team or Facebook Messenger using a service such as Zapier. Please note, when using your chatbot, your customers won't be able to perform dynamic activities such as placing an order, or making a reservation. However, we may add these capabilities in the future. ==//== Do I need an OpenAI API Key? No. However you have the option of providing one and certain advanced features may require it, for example if you’d like to use GPT-4. ==//== Will OpenAI see my documents? Yes. OpenAI will see all the documents you upload to Mottle as we use their embedding and completion APIs to generate your bot’s responses. ==//== What is OpenAI's data retention policy? OpenAI has stated (March 2023) that they won't use any data passed to it via the API for training purposes. Furthermore they will delete all query data after 30 days. However, please do your own research and refer to the OpenAI website for the most up to date information. ==//== Should I upload confidential documents to Mottle? This is up to you, but do so at your own risk. Be aware however that your documents will be stored on our servers (Google Cloud & Pinecone) and will be passed to OpenAI. ==//== Where can I find your documentation? You can find our documentation here: https://docs.mottle.com ==//== How can I report a bug? Please email hello@mottle.com ==//== How can I request a new feature? Please click on the "Feature Requests" link in the side menu and submit a new ticket. ==//== Can I delete my bot after testing? Yes, on the Settings page you can choose to delete your bot as required. This will automatically create a new blank bot for you. ==//== How can I split up items in my training documents? You can use the special token ==//== on a new line to split up your documents into distinct sections. This ensures that the most relevant information is passed to ChatGPT at query time. ==//== Does Mottle use GPT-4? Yes. At the present time all paid accounts use the OpenAI model `gpt-4-turbo`. However, you are welcome to use GPT-4 if you have access to that API, however you'll need to supply your own OpenAI API key and pay OpenAI for the queries separately, even if you have a paid Mottle account. ==//== How secure is Mottle? Mottle is hosted on Google Cloud (specifically Firebase) and Pinecone (also within the Google Cloud ecosystem) using security best-practices. Note your information is passed to OpenAI for processing. ==//== Do you offer an enterprise package? Yes. Please contact us for more information. ==//== Can you speak X (Chinese/Russian/French/German etc)? Yes, I can speak many languages. You can train your own bot in whatever language you wish. ==//== Who is behind Mottle? Mottle was owned by MottleBot Pty Ltd, a company located in Sydney, Australia. It was created by Mike Knapp, a former Google software engineer and product manager. ==//== Isn't Mottle just a fancy FAQ? Yes and no. This particular bot is built using a FAQ format, however, the bot can intelligently understand what the user is saying and act in a dynamic way. You could also add a lot of additional information to this bot, for example user manuals, reports, memos, policy documents etc. ==//== Who are some companies using Mottle? I can't disclose that information. However, a wide range of companies are using Mottle across various industries, including legal, manufacturing and health. ==//== I want to build a chatbot about [x] topic? Can I do this? It will depend on what kind of content you wish to include. We are bound by OpenAI's usage guidelines. Prohibited content includes illegal activity, child exploitation, hateful or violent content, malware, actions causing physical or economic harm, fraud, adult content, political campaigning, privacy violations, unauthorized legal or financial advice, and providing medical diagnoses or treatments. Additionally, OpenAI platforms should not be used for high-risk government decision-making, such as law enforcement or migration and asylum matters. If that all sounds good, why not get started creating your bot right now! All you need to do is upload some documents on the "Train Your Bot" page. ==//== Can you help me implement my bot? I can't make your bot for you, but I'm here to answer any questions before you get started. What questions do you have? ==//== I want to create a bot for Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Email etc? This is possible! First create your bot on Mottle. Then you'll need to use Zapier to connect your bot to whichever service you'd like to use. For more information, have a look at our documentation site, where there are detailed instructions for connecting with Zapier. Note, Zapier integration requires a paid Zapier account. ==//== Can my bot help me with tasks like doing my taxes, writing a web novel, etc? Maybe, but we can't guarantee it. It depends on how you train your bot, and exactly what you need. Mottle has been primarily developed to help people create customer service chatbots, or internal knowledge base chatbots. However, we're still learning how Mottle can be used. Why not test it out and see? ==//== How can I use the Mottle API? For instructions on how to access the API, please refer to the "Share Your Bot" page. ==//== For Mottle to work on my website, do I need to use a particular service provider? (i.e. Wordpress?) Mottle will work on any website, not just Wordpress. Simply copy and paste the HTML code provided on the "Share Your Bot" page.