Show HN: HelpHub – GPT chatbot for any site (helphub.commandbar.com)
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
47 comments
[ 76.1 ms ] story [ 1694 ms ] thread- 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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ideally we could be the UI layer for intercom, zendesk, etc. We already do that for docs search / exploration.
What do you have on the roadmap for upcoming features? Is there anything you're particularly excited about adding?
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
I actually see that commandbar.com has an intercom chat widget.
AI is then theoretically the next best thing.
However, we do love to use our products! Once logged in, you will see that we replaced the Intercom chat widget with HelpHub there. We still offer Intercom chat as a fallback if you need to talk to a human.
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.