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Show HN: SiteGPT – Create ChatGPT-like chatbots trained on your website content (sitegpt.ai)

118 points by pbteja1998 ↗ HN
Hello everyone,

I am the founder of a blogging platform called Feather.so.

People can sign up and create their own blogs using Feather.

Now, with OpenAI releasing their API, they made using AI so accessible for someone like me. So I wanted to add a chatbot functionality to my customer blogs. Basically, I wanted to automatically create a chatbot for each of my customer blogs. That chatbot will be trained on the content on their blog.

When I set out to do this using Open AI, I thought I could do this for every website, not just for my customer blogs.

So I ended up creating an entirely new product called SiteGPT.ai so that it can be used on any website.

The workflow works like this. People login the platform, they enter their website url, and click on a button to start training. Then I start creating a chatbot and train the chatbot will all the content on the website that the user enters.

That chatbot now knows everything about that website. It can answer any questions related to that website.

I have also added a demo chatbot at the bottom right of the sitegpt.ai website. That chatbot is trained on the content of SiteGPT.ai. So it can answer any questions related to its own website.

Please try it out and let me know if you have any feedback. I am also happy to take any other technical questions you may have.

Thanks.

102 comments

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zb3
This comment is a rare case of an actually interesting and not so irrelevant spam link.
Fatboyrunning
Sorry but I am not going to pay for this before trying it out on my content.

Surely there can be a test function within the website which allows me to see what a user would experience?

pbteja1998
Yeah, I didn't know how much that is going to cost me if I added a free trial. But I can create a demo for you if you like. Give me an example web page link for which you want the chatbot.

I will create one and post the link here. Just a single page url.

mpeg
I don’t mean to be harsh, but if running a free trial would bankrupt you, you shouldn’t be trying to start a company.

It also doesn’t inspire much confidence in your early users, there’s been a lot of these GPT API cashgrabs popping up all over so if you want to differentiate yourself you might need to actually incur some risk.

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dorilama
If you can't risk 19$ to see if a service can bring value to your website maybe you shouldn't give advice about starting a company?
mpeg
I think I'm qualified to give this advice, seeing as some of the biggest brands in the world have trusted my advice on digital marketing.

It has nothing to do about whether I personally can risk the $19, I'm not even in the target audience for this – the question is what percentage of the target audience is going to be ready to pay $19 for something they don't know is going to work for their site, and how much bigger would that pie be if the site owner spent a tiny amount on offering trials.

Just making people get their card out is going to make a huge percentage of leads drop off, especially when there's almost no content/demos or an actual working trial in the site (even the screenshot is just a static screenshot instead of a live demo).

If you want to know more, you can reach out via email and I'd be happy to help (though it might cost you a bit more than $19)

phil-martin
What if instead of offering free trials to everybody, you estimate how many free trials you could afford, and limit it to that?

In exchange for the free trial the potential customer gives you permission to use it as a demo for others to try out and see how it performs.

pqdbr
Same here. I know it hurts to offer a free trial for something that already costs you money to serve (those API calls won't be free), but it's really hard to sign up without trying it first.
pbteja1998
Yes, I understand. I will give you the same option as the previous person. Please give me a sample webpage, just one web page and I will create a chatbot for that webpage, and post the chatbot link here.
marktani
I wonder if there is a way to let users generate this one-page demo themselves dynamically, rather than via a manual interaction by you.

what's to say you won't add specific optimizations by hand now that aren't included in the product out of the box?

edit: ah, just saw your other comment about being afraid free trial gets out of hand financially

a solution could be to only allow x number of free tokens for a given demo chatbot

pbteja1998
I understand. In that case, the only way is to subscribe to the $19/month plan and try it out for yourself. You can cancel anytime you like with the click of a button.
adrr
Same boat. Not paying unless you can show me a demo of it working with my content. Do even know if their scrapper can properly scrape our site.
mpaepper
You can do it yourself with this repo and only pay the OpenAI API fees: https://github.com/mpaepper/content-chatbot
Veen
Your content-chatbot repo was very useful when I was figuring out how to achieve this sort of thing with langchain. I was able to knock together a chatbot for a client's documentation site in an afternoon. But I guess the real value for SiteGPT is the ease-of-use and the client-side chat interface.
holoduke
Do you simple paste the entire content of a webpage inside a prompt? You prepend the question from an enduser with that content?:i.e. dear chatgpt api, could you answer the following question [user question] based on the following text [website contents]
pbteja1998
Not exactly. Given one of my plans has 5000 pages, it is not possible to just paste the entire content in a prompt. Open AI API has a max tokens limit.

I will first do some pre-processing on the content and fetch the relevant pieces of content before giving it as a prompt to the API.

tracyhenry
how do you decide what content on the page to index, and how to split them to fit the context window?

Amazing concept btw - would love to see more examples (like a chatbot for a more well-known site).

pbteja1998
I index everything. I don't pick and choose. Like I said, I do pre-processing to scrape the entire website content.

When the user asks, I try to get the relevant bits and answer the question based on that.

amrrs
It's pretty straightforward forward with LangChain and GPT-Index. There are lot of tutorials on the Internet for the same like this one https://youtu.be/9TxEQQyv9cE
visarga
I don't think chunking + embedding based retrieval is good enough. It's a good first draft for a solution, but the chunks are out of context, so the LLM could combine them in an unintended way.

Better to question each document separately and then combine the answers into one last LLM round. Even so, there might be inter-document context that is lost - for example looking at one document that depends on details in another one. Large collections of documents should be loaded up in multiple passes, as the interpretation of a document can change when encountering information in another document. Adding one single piece of information to a collection of documents could slightly change the interpretation of everything, that's how humans incorporate new information.

One interesting application of document-collection based chat bots is finding inconsistencies and contradictions in the source text. If they can do that, they can correctly incorporate new information.

tracyhenry
I guess not. Probably an offline process where they scrape the websites into chunks and build embeddings. At query time first search for the relevant chunks and then put those chunks into the prompt?

Would love more details though from the author!

pbteja1998
Yes, you are right. It's not possible to give the entire content in a prompt. A users' site can have a lot of pages and each page can potentially be super long.
robertd7
You need to split content into chunk but also need to retain semantic meaning. I have been building same thing: https://chatfast.io. This also support scanned pdf and image. (I built my own algorithm, backend in c# not using llama_index or langchain)
battybro0034
Why did you need to create your own algorithm? And how much time did it take?
mighty_donkey
Congrats :) Question: do websites even have enough information to train on and create useful results?
pbteja1998
The chatbot can only be as good as the website content. But this is also a good thing.

This is an opportunity for the chatbot owner to add more relevant content to the website.

They don't have to think about what content to add. They can just see what questions the visitors have about their website and can add/edit their website content based on that.

After adding the improved content, retraining the chatbot with the new content will be as easy as clicking a button.

consumer451
> The chatbot can only be as good as the website content. But this is also a good thing.

> This is an opportunity for the chatbot owner to add more relevant content to the website.

This is very interesting. It seems as though from the point of view of the site author, the chatbot's performance could be viewed as a "compiled/executable" version of the site's text. In the same way a software dev clicks Run to see the output, a writer could use the chat performance to look for gaps and bugs in the site copy.

I_am_tiberius
I want some intercom/crisp functionality there like getting an MS Teams chat started up with my customer optionally.
pbteja1998
I got this request from so many users already. So I will be adding a button inside the chatbot which says "Talk with Human", that will trigger Crisp/Intercom or whatever live chat the website owner has configured.

It's already in the plans.

nemo44x
This is really simple to build yourself. Just use SentenanceTransformers in python, pineconeDB, and whatever screen scrape library you line. Chunk your site content before storing in pineconeDB and then search and whatever you get back use as context for the GPT Chat API.
pbteja1998
Yes, my target audience are no-coders or anyone who just wants something ready to integrate on their website without handling any infra on their own.

Some of the customers I got are non-technical people. So it was perfect for them.

They get a very good chatbot even if they don't know how to code.

camhart
Any business/website owner who deals with customer support will like it (assuming it works well).

My guess is the people on here poo pooing this idea are programmers who don't deal with customer support. Don't let their negative response deter you. Let them be fools.

nemo44x
I’m not poo-pooing it. It’s great to see someone take initiative. I’m just saying if you’re wondering how to use GPT to do this, this is how. Build it yourself in a couple hours or buy the service, I don’t care.

Just sharing the details for those that are curious in how to make their own chatbot on their data.

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Freebytes
Many people think that simple projects have no market because they are simple, but Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on are all simple projects. People do not want to build their own [insert literally anything]. People that value their time will pay for services such as this, and I wish you luck.
satvikpendem
This comment has the same energy as the infamous Dropbox comment on HN. Do you think no-coders and others in general are really going to build out their own implementation?

That said, companies like Intercom, Zendesk and other customer service companies are already starting to do this.

malborodog
What’s the infamous Dropbox comment? Sounds hilarious.
satvikpendem
> I have a few qualms with this app:

> 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

> 2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

> 3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863#9224

quickthrower2
Same can be said about washing dishes, or growing carrots.

This is priced at about 10-20 minutes of a developers time per month.

creatonez
These AI chatbots on websites are beyond useless, and LLMs won't make them any better. When you go to the chat-based support interface on a website, it's usually because you've read the entire contents of the website and didn't find what you are looking for. Now you will just get a hallucinated answer, with no indication as to whether it's a human or AI you're talking to.
Voloskaya
> When you go to the chat-based support interface on a website, it's usually because you've read the entire contents of the website and didn't find what you are looking for.

Because chatbots were so far utterly useless.

It doesn't seem crazy to think that given a good enough chatbot, users might prefer to ask their question directly rather than have to find the specific piece of information they need from a dense docs website.

consumer451
> > When you go to the chat-based support interface on a website, it's usually because you've read the entire contents of the website and didn't find what you are looking for.

> Because chatbots were so far utterly useless.

My guess is that you are correct. I have been thinking that rebranding site chatbots will be needed and inevitable. I wonder what that will look like.

quickthrower2
Those ones are using inferior models. I am using ChatGPT for a lot of stuff: personal, work, hobbies. Anything where what I say isn’t private. And it is wickedly helpful.

Extending this to sites makes sense. Eventually this service will need to compete against Google or Bing chat based search with regular indexing and it’ll probably get put out of business unless it pivots into tailor made models or something else the big guys can’t offer en mass.

ashleynewman
Disagree. I now defer to chatGPT instead of reading raw documentation. Even if it can hallucinate an answer it's still way faster and better for discoverability.
ElFitz
Even better. When provided with your context (use case, models,…) it can adapt its answer to it.

Although that can also lead to hallucinations, it’s still quite wonderful.

tough
Even better, just ask your stack

https://ask-your-stack.vercel.app/

(It uses official docs to provide answers with context)

ElFitz
Quite nice, but by definition limited to the stacks it covers, isn’t it?
tough
It's open source, so you could certainly add any missing pieces, or even custom code which docs are not public, to your ask-your-stack* version.

At the end of the day with LangchainJS + LlamaIndex anything is possible

futhey
As someone who spends a lot of time answering user questions in chat support, I sincerely wish more people bothered to read the website or at least try the search box first.
xbmcuser
If it knows the answer to the question the likelihood of hallucination goes down from what I understand. There is a lot of knowledge on many specialised forums hundreds of thousands of question and user generated answers getting chatgptlike bot be trained on those would I personally feel very useful.
istillwritecode
I'll pay attention to these things when they are open source instead of a service.
BoorishBears
Not to go full "Dropbox in a weekend", but if you're technical enough to self-host, this is something you can build for yourself

Everyone is going straight to embeddings, but it'd be easy enough to use old school NLP summarization from NLTK (https://www.nltk.org/)

Hook that up a web scraping library like https://scrapy.org/ and get a summary of each page.

Then embed a site map in your system prompt and use langchain (https://github.com/hwchase17/langchain) to allow GPT to query for a specific page's summary.

-

The point of this isn't to say that's how OP did it, but there might be people seeing stuff like this and wondering how on earth to get into it: This is something you could build in a weekend with pretty much no understanding of AI

AnthonyMouse
Is that (i.e. GPT) not still a service?

What people want is something they can run on their own hardware without sending their queries to some third party service which is doing who knows what with them.

This is already possible if you want to mess around with green code that isn't in system repositories yet and buy expensive hardware to make it fast, but you can imagine why some people don't have the time or money for that.

I'm waiting for Intel or AMD to realize there would be a line out the door if they'd make a CPU with an iGPU that could use system memory and run these models at even a quarter of the speed of typical discrete GPUs.

BoorishBears
I mean you don't need to use GPT, it's just if you wanted to build the product in OP (ChatGPT tuned for your site) you would.

Question answering can be tackled by smaller models that run on CPUs: https://huggingface.co/tasks/question-answering

And if it's strictly for personal use there's always the chat-tuned stuff being built on top of LLaMA like Alpaca

> waiting for Intel or AMD to realize

Intel and AMD just got their lunch eaten by Apple Silicon which did exactly that, so I'm sure they're working on it

AnthonyMouse
> I mean you don't need to use GPT, it's just if you wanted to build the product in OP (ChatGPT tuned for your site) you would.

Hence the demand for something else.

> Intel and AMD just got their lunch eaten by Apple Silicon which did exactly that, so I'm sure they're working on it

Apple's GPU doesn't benchmark much different than competing iGPUs for gaming. It may be that the only thing stopping anyone from running this stuff on existing iGPUs is software support.

BoorishBears
> Hence the demand for something else.

Something else would not be ChatGPT tuned for your site. Like I said there are other models, but a lot of people want ChatGPT as they currently interact with it but with additional knowledge about their website. This is that.

> Apple's GPU doesn't benchmark much different than competing iGPUs for gaming.

GPGPU is not gaming. Unified memory means that Apple Silicon's "RAM" can be compared to VRAM for inference.

AnthonyMouse
> Something else would not be ChatGPT tuned for your site.

I suspect a lot of people would be satisfied with anything functionally equivalent regardless of whether it is ChatGPT(TM)-brand.

> GPGPU is not gaming. Unified memory means that Apple Silicon's "RAM" can be compared to VRAM for inference.

The M1 and M2 have a 128-bit memory bus, the same as ordinary dual-channel systems. Only the Pro and Max have more (by 2x and 4x), and it's not obvious that's even the bottleneck here, because the reason they have more is to have enough for the GPU and CPU at the same time, not because a GPU of that size needs that much memory bandwidth when the CPU is idle.

For example, the RTX 4070 Ti is about twice as fast at inference as the RTX 3070 Ti, even though it has slightly less memory bandwidth. And the 4070 Ti has only ~25% more memory bandwidth than the M2 Max GPU but is many times faster.

There is presumably a point at which inference becomes bottlenecked by memory bandwidth rather than compute hardware, but the garden variety x86_64 iGPU may not even be past it, and if it is it's not by much.

The interesting things are a) getting the code written to make existing hardware easy to use, and b) maybe introducing some hefty iGPUs into the server systems with 12 channels per socket and wouldn't run out of memory bandwidth even with significantly more compute hardware, and could then be supplied with hundreds of GB worth of RDIMMs.

quickthrower2
Sweet spot is both. Open source. Pay an expert $19/m to handle this for you knowing you can fallback if they shutdown

Once there are enough of these it may not matter? Just like aws isn’t open source but we use it.

paxys
So are you not paying attention to ChatGPT?
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ilrwbwrkhv
There are just so many of these copycat services all doing the same thing.
bumblewax
Cool idea! Maybe I misunderstand how it would work, but let’s say you have a long post (or multiple posts) on a topic. Won’t it be difficult to get a good answer that takes all content into account if only a small chunk can be used for the GPT prompt?
pbteja1998
Yes, it's a multi step process. The first step is to figure out which chunks of text is relevant to the question. Then we can generate answer based on that.
pmarreck
How can I train a model on all of my facebook, twitter, reddit, hackernews and other posts available on the Internet, to help me act as me on my "off" days? ;)

(I have a 21 month old. You don't know "off" days until you've had a kid.)

billylo
I am looking to build this for a different reason so families (today and future) can chat with a virtual me. I know what you mean tho. I am a parent too.
rageandchaos
This is nothing new. Chat bots have existed for years.
proxy9
Paid service on api / llama wrappers. Laaame
Veen
The APIs aren't free. For a large site, creating the embeddings and then serving lots of users would quickly get expensive. Although I do think this is overpriced.
quickthrower2
Any chance of a cheaper plan for those bringing their own api key? And maybe if you get some VC money, a free version for Open Source :-)
pbteja1998
I am an indie bootstrapper, so no VC money haha.

Right now, there is no way to add your own API key. I will try to look into this option in the future.

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abxytg
OpenAI provides a demo to do this in their docs:

https://platform.openai.com/docs/tutorials/web-qa-embeddings

IME doing this task the scraping isn't easy to generalize. the embed / chat part is honestly low hanging fruit on top of the openAI api. if you're capable of scraping the content you want to do this with I'd say whip it up yourself. its a 15m project.

number6
Cool they monitized the tutorial
Syonyk
That pricing is... yowch.

> Please try it out...

No, thank you. Not for $100/mo without any sort of trial!

It would be marginally interesting to play with it on my ~8 year blog (https://www.sevarg.net), but I have ~300 posts and ~900k words written.

Dumb question, though... if I put all my content into a single page on a subdomain (easy enough to do, I use Jekyll to render my stuff), would the free plan barf on a 900k word document, or would it happily ingest it?

Also, what does "One chatbot" mean? Only one person can interact with it at a time?

pbteja1998
Yes, technically it will index everything if it's just a single page. Some people have already started abusing it like that. I need to put in place some restrictions for that.

Assume you have multiple products. You can't give the content of both these websites to a single chatbot, right? For example, if someone asks chatbot about "What's the pricing", should it give the pricing of first product or second product?

In cases like this, it makes sense to create multiple chatbots (one chatbot for each website) and keep the content separate.

Syonyk
Ah, OK. That makes sense as far as the chatbot count. That's quite unclear to me from the site, and the chatbot isn't any more helpful.

> What is the difference between pricing plans in terms of chatbots? What does that mean, exactly?

> SiteGPT offers different pricing plans based on the number of chatbots and web pages/documents that can be created. The Essential plan allows for the creation of one chatbot and up to 25 web pages/documents, while the Growth plan allows for the creation of two chatbots and up to 100 web pages/documents. The Pro plan is the most popular and allows for the creation of five chatbots and up to 500 web pages/documents. The Elite plan is the best value and allows for the creation of unlimited chatbots and up to 5000 web pages/documents. The pricing plans are designed to accommodate websites of all sizes and needs.

Congratulations, it "read the Powerpoint slide again." I had some college professors who did that. Ask for clarification, they'd read the slide again, as if I'd not understood the slide the first time.

Meh. Good luck.

pbteja1998
Yeah, chatbot can only be as good as the content that is in the website. If the chatbot didn't answer it properly, that's because I did not have content on the website to answer this question.
visarga
I bet when chatGPT Plugins open up, there's going to be one where you can point to your website or PDF collection to load them up in the index. It's going to be one of the basic operations, these products like siteGPT won't be able to compete in simplicity of use.
aik
Interesting. Mind sharing how you’re doing the “training”? Search across a vectorstore all the text gets stored in?
EGreg
How does it train on your site though? Embeddings ?
pbteja1998
Yeah. Embeddings is also a part of the workflow.
meghan_rain
Does this actually finetune a GPT3 model and embedding the knowledge inside the model or is it doing something retrieval based like langchain?
yawnxyz
Ok is this really "training" a new model on the data? Or are you breaking it down into vector embeddings, and then using an embeddings search against the relevant content and then passing that into the context window of the OpenAI API?

This is cool, thanks for putting it together — but I think we as a group of designers and engineers should get our language right. If we mean creating embeddings — we should say it, since "training a new model" is very different from using embeddings...

sergiotapia
It's pretty straightforward to build something like this.

Pseudo:

    embedding = OpenAI.generate_embedding(some_question)

    embedding_matches = pinecone.query(embedding)
    context_strings = embedding_matches.context_strings

    OpenAI.chat(some_question + context_strings)
You give OpenAI's chat API something like:

    """
    This is my user question, how old is James bond?
 
    using this context answer this question:

    {{from doc: james bon is 19 years old}}
    """
Really powerful, really useful - but really simple to create.
nullzzz
Interesting concept! The pricing is very aggressive though, if you have a substantial amount of content. Also, per-page pricing makes no sense - should be more like per-character.
Obertr
bro, the pricing is very aggressive. I saw similar websites with exactly the same concept order of magnitude cheaper.
raylad
Your chatbot sometimes won't display the most recent question/answer (Firefox).