DocsBot: Automating WordPress Support with AI

A Look at Docsbot.ai with Aaron Edwards

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[00:01:01] Matt: Hey Aaron, welcome to the program.

[00:01:03] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Thanks for having me.

[00:01:05] Matt: I don’t wanna make this my AI therapy session

[00:01:08] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:09] Matt: but I figured since I have you on the call, I might turn that into, I might turn this into an AI therapy session. Aaron Edwards, docs bot.ai, imagine ai, but you have a storied background in WordPress.

[00:01:24] For those that don’t know, catch us up to speed. Where did you start in WordPress? What have you been doing for the last decade and what led you up to what you’re doing now?

[00:01:33] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Yeah, sure. I started, let’s see, way back. WordPress 2.6, I think is when I first kind of joined the community. And I found it because of multi-site, it was called WordPress, multi-user back then, and I was building kind of a network of sites as a project. And so, started Playing with that and then started teaching myself, plugin development. And,eventually I joined up with W P M U Dev, is a larger WordPress like plugin and services company. And I’ve been with them for, gosh, 14 years and the last 11 or so serving as the C T O for that company. and more recently I’ve been, kind of experimenting and building my own things, especially with AI technology. And, just went full-time doing that in the last few months here. so now it’s full-time working on Docs Spa and Imagine ai. So it’s exciting.

[00:02:22] Matt: I don’t wanna go sidebar too much, but I saw recently they launched a sort of like white label reseller plan for, for their hosting package. Were you, were you a part of that building out that technology?

[00:02:35] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Yeah, for sure. we’ve been doing some amazing stuff in the last few years just focusing on targeting agencies and, and products for WordPress agencies specifically. And so now you can do everything, all of the W P M U dev products can be fully white labeled and sold under your own brand from your own old own website and everything.

[00:02:54] It’s pretty cool.

[00:02:55] Matt: Yeah, it looks pretty cool. Maybe I’ll get somebody, maybe you know, somebody on the team.

[00:02:59] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Yeah,

[00:03:00] Matt: I could get on the podcast. How about ? How about that?

[00:03:03] let’s talk about Doc Spot. Let’s start with Dark Spot, doc, spot, dot ai. I don’t want to pitch it for you. I’ll let you pitch it, but I’ll say that I have found myself struggling to really get into AI chat, G P T specifically, can I find a use case for this?

[00:03:22] chat g p t thing that I paid 20 bucks a month for. Can I really make it part of my day-to-day productivity? ’cause my God, Twitter tells me I should,

[00:03:29] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:30] Matt: Doc spot ai, what does it do? What’s the value prop and, and how can folks get ahold of it?

[00:03:35] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Yeah, sure. So when, after chat G p t came out and, some of these APIs first started becoming available, I started playing around with that and, and learning it a lot more in depth and kinda the first thing I built was, uh, I called it Chat wp, and that’s at, I think WP Docs chat. And basically I just trained a chat bot. With all the WordPress core documentation, like from wordpress.org and, scraped all that and used that to train the chat bot just to make like a free kind of tool where people in the community can like, ask questions about WordPress and get answers from its knowledge from that training. And, that was kind of like a fun project and for the community and kind of a proof of concept also. And then I kind of took that technology and adapted it and, and kind of honed it further to actually launch a, a business off of it called Doc Spot. AI and, so what Docs Bott basically does is it lets you custom train chat g p t with your company’s data. So whether it’s document files, whether it’s just letting it crawl your entire website or your knowledge base or support content, And using that to train the chat bot, which you can then turn around and use for frontline customer support and pre-sales. Or you can use it for like internal knowledge bots. A lot of our customers use it for that, for their teams. Like they’ll have their HR and standard operating procedures and things like that, in there. And you can use it for, of course, like copywriting and things like that. But I think the best use cases are for like more like

[00:05:04] question answer type things.

[00:05:05] Matt: Is the secret. Sauce and all of this stuff. like the actual training process, like when you say I’ve trained it to do this, is that the secret sauce in, into, into how folks are going to leverage chat G P T in any instance? I want to make chat g p t right, better in the way that I write. Do I just keep training it on how I’ve written in the past for the last 15 years online?

[00:05:30] Is that the secret sauce to make this stuff more effective?

[00:05:32] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Yeah, there’s a lot of different techniques. for chat, G B T, it’s kind of like, was kind of revolutionary when it came out because actually the underlying model for that, which is they call it like, G P T 3.5, that’s actually been around for quite a while, for a few years now. but no one founded that revolutionary until they did this new thing, which was basically fine tuning it. what’s it’s called? R H L F. and basically they, they fine tuned it with questions and then how humans would want to see an answer. And so they took that underlying model and they tuned it in a way so that it could be like released in like a chat interface where a normal person could ask it to do things without having to understand the weird prompts and, and special patterns you need to do to make it output what you want.

[00:06:17] So, like that model actually isn’t new. It is just the fine tuning that made it much more useful. And so

[00:06:24] you can actually extend that, that core public chat, c b t, you can extend that even further by fine tuning it. We’re using techniques like we do called retrieval augmented generation to where you’re actually like pasting text for it to answer questions based on, and, and so doing that allows you to kind of fine tune the output further and, and make it, suit your needs a lot better.

[00:06:47] Matt: Does, O OpenAI or chat G B T, do they give you the. I’m not familiar with it, so I’ll just say, do they give you the framework in order to help train these models on your own or are they like, no, no, like you, you kind of gotta feed that back into the chat G P T machine, if you will.

[00:07:03] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Yeah, well, there’s different ways. There’s one that’s called like fine tuning, and that was actually only released by OpenAI and just S gosh, I think less than a month ago, or maybe about a month ago. And that is where you’re actually like officially training it on and creating a custom model. that is better at not necessarily training with data, but more giving examples of styles.

[00:07:25] So it’s kind of similar to if you said you gave it a prompt and said, okay, I want you to write this. Here’s a whole list of examples of what it should look like. You know, question and answer, and then you give it, and you tell it to go to the races. So it’s kind of like that, but a more efficient way of doing that.

[00:07:41] So you fine tune it ahead of time with, with a, with a, database of examples of what you want the output to look like for a specific prompt. but that is not what we do at Doc Spot. first of all, it’s kind of costly and slow. And second, it’s much better at like capturing just like the styles of output, your speaking style or tone or things like that than it is at capturing like raw, data and facts, which is what you want when you’re doing like a support chat bot.

[00:08:07] You want to be able to give accurate answers to your users. And so what we do is called, Retrieval augmented generation. And imagine if, let’s say you asked a question or a customer asked a question, okay, what is the most expensive plan for this product? Right? And so in the backend, what we’re doing is we’re actually searching all the documentation we’ve, we’ve. Indexed and then finding like text chunks that might answer that question. So, okay. This is a text chunk that talks about their pricing. And so basically all we’re doing is we’re pasting that into chat G P T and then saying, based on this text that we pasted here, what is the answer to this question? So it allows it to give a lot more factual answers without having to custom train it every single time. does

[00:08:54] that make sense?

[00:08:54] Matt: It certainly does. So, WordPress product company, they’ve got their,this would go on and assist their knowledge base or their presales documentation

[00:09:04] perhaps. Maybe if they don’t even have that. You could start like a, if it was a very, I almost said immature, but that’s not the right word.

[00:09:12] Early stage, WordPress product company, maybe they just have blog posts.

[00:09:16] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: right, exactly.

[00:09:17] Matt: train it on, on the basics of that and, and that’s how somebody could start.

[00:09:20] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Yeah, that’s the normal use case. Most people, they just point at their site and then we crawl the entire site map and index their blog and, and knowledge base if they have one and, and things or marketing information. And that’s usually definitely not, at least for handing the pre-sales and questions about the product, um, from your marketing material. and of course if you have an in-depth knowledge base, that’s much better if they’re gonna. Be asking like very detailed questions about usage and things like that. but what we do is we make it really simple to have that as like your frontline agent that’s available 24 7 and can answer questions in any language that’s thrown at it, which is pretty amazing in itself. and then if it can’t answer, it presents them like an option to seamlessly transfer that to your existing, like live chat or ticket support so they can instantly kind of, escalate that to human support. But, the stats that we see are really amazing in it, like the companies, that have implemented. Implemented it well or seeing like about 80%,deflection rate. So that means eight outta 10 support tickets don’t even hit your inbox anymore, which is pretty amazing and that saves a lot of time and a lot of costs for your company.

[00:10:29] Matt: I can imagine anyone with a freemium model that has a, a free plugin on wordpress.org and you just get those tire kickers or

[00:10:37] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: yes,

[00:10:38] Matt: are just like, no idea what they’re doing. you know, this is something that, that really helps. I’m on . Spot ai. Right now I’m looking at the pricing page. help me understand the docs bot, line item.

[00:10:50] So I see one doc spot, three docs bot, 10 docs. Bot. What, what is the differentiator? What is a doc spot?

[00:10:56] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: yeah. essentially we just allowed you like, I wasn’t sure if I should call it like a bot or a library or it’s like kind of a combo of both of them right now. So basically it’s, it’s an independent bot that’s trained with an independent like set of Content and documentation. And then with, with each of those, you can configure, different preferences like giving it custom prompts to change its behavior or tone of voice or, changing like the design of the chat widget if you’re using our chat widget in your website, that kind of thing.

[00:11:26] So, um, basically, most businesses they just have one or two, or maybe if they have like a bunch of distinct products, then it’s better for them to create a distinct bot for each product.

[00:11:39] Matt: what does the training look like from ? Your customer’s side, is this something that they, okay, this is, with D Script, right, which is my audio editing app. I have to kind of train it my voice if I want to use the audio repair tool, and sometimes the audio training can be hours long, like they want me to talk for hours.

[00:12:02] what is it like to train a doc Bott?

[00:12:04] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: well, it’s, it’s really quite fast. So we have, gosh, we have 15 different sources of data right now. So we have a single U r L you just paste in the U R L and that takes seconds for it to learn from all the data on that page. document files you can. Just upload text files like a Word doc, P D F H M L, where you can upload just like a zip file with a whole directory full of your documentation. we have a feature where you can upload, like the export file from your WordPress site, the X M L export, and that will just do your whole per site like that. our most popular ones are probably the site map and URL U R L list. So you just point it at the u r l of your site or a specific site map on your site, like if you have a site map. Yost creates like a site map for your documentation post type or, or whatever it is. so you can just point it at that and then our crawler goes out, crawls all the pages it finds on the site map, does all the fancy stuff on the back end to clean up that data, make it real clean and pristine, and learn from, all the text content, the images and links and tables and things like that, and preserve all that formatting for you.

[00:13:09] Matt: do, do they use your own, their own chat, g p t key, or is that your own

[00:13:15] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: currently yes. We, we have you, provide your own key so that way you kind of have ownership of your data and, and control and things like that. Um, and that way we’re not like just being like a a p I reseller necessarily, or not. Charging you some, some premium on top of the open AI AI credits instead of we’re just charging you for a service and then you bring your own key. Uh, we’re looking at, maybe changing that model in the near future just to make it easier for beginners to get started, and have that as an optional, ability for people to do.

[00:13:48] Matt: Talk to me about, putting the, the product for a side for a moment. Let’s just talk about, ethics in ai. And I am not anywhere near versed in like ethical law in artificial intelligence, although what a title that would make on a business card. I could probably start handing it out and people would probably believe me.

[00:14:07] I hear something like this and I’m like, wow, you could train. Competitor content for yourself, right? I could have a bot

[00:14:16] learning, let’s say, gravity Forms,

[00:14:17] just sucking up all the information that Gravity Forms is posting out, knowledge based, blog posts, marketing sentiment, all this stuff.

[00:14:24] And I can turn over to my competitor bot one day and be like, so what’s gravity forms up to?

[00:14:29] What’s WSS forms up to? What’s WP forms up to? And I could kind of just get these insights into, into my own pool of knowledge. Holding that aside, I see people can block, chat g p t from crawling their site on through robots, T X T, no pun intended, but they can block that and stop chat g p T from crawling it.

[00:14:51] Are we gonna move into a world where this knowledge is isn’t as it easy to access right now for people to start improving their models? Should people be thinking, wow, maybe I shouldn’t allow AI to crawl my site? What, what’s your thought on thoughts on that kind of access to your content, to your data?

[00:15:15] Because competitors could kind of flip the script, if you will, and, and do this kind of knowledge work against your own content.

[00:15:22] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Yeah, as far as like that crawling ability, I don’t see it any different than what search engines have been doing since the beginning. And people pay a lot of money and spend a lot of time trying to get search engines, engines to crawl their stuff, you know? I would start preparing for the future when it’s not search, where it’s AI answers and where people are gonna be entering in.

[00:15:43] Google a question, what is the best forms? Plug in for WordPress and you want yours to be the one that it recommends, right?

[00:15:51] Matt: Yeah,

[00:15:51] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: You don’t want it to be your competitors that it recommends. So, heck yeah, I would, I would be doing everything I can to let chat G B T and other AI models crawl and learn from my content. Um, and that opens, of course, all kinds of Weird doors. Like you remember the, the old like black hat days of ss e o and

[00:16:08] keyword stuffing and all the crazy stuff people would do to, to try to get their sights crawled and get to the top of the results. And there’s gonna be a lot of that stuff as people are experimenting with this whole new world of technology.

[00:16:20] can I insert like secret prompts that, that will, trick the AI in the future to always recommend my product. You know, things like that, like prompt hacking, all all kinds of stuff. Who knows what. this new world is gonna unlock. But in general, I, I think it’s just the next phase of, of what we’ve been doing before with ss e o.

[00:16:41] Matt: Yeah. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s quite interesting, you know, looking at, you know, chat g p T for, or no, all of chat G P T, right? All of chat g PT now can search the web through, I. Bing’s brows

[00:16:56] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:57] Matt: search engine, right? That was the most recent update. And Yeah.

[00:17:01] just playing with that and seeing how you, it’ll cite the, the source, U r L, you know, you’re kind of sitting here going, Geeh, do I want to put this content out there and, and have this hard-earned content be the source of somebody else’s answers or somebody else’s service?

[00:17:19] And then it’s also, well, That door is pretty big . And if it’s search, if that’s the future of search, well now you’re kind of kicking yourself if you lock yourself out,

[00:17:29] um, it’s a wild west time to a degree in, in my opinion.

[00:17:34] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: For sure. And I think kind of another thing too is it very much changes like how, if we’re like for us that are product owners and thinking about marketing and SS e O. Is, it changes kind of that strategy because we don’t know for sure, like right now, like Bing and, and the Google, Bard, they kind of cite the sources. if they pull info live from, from your website or something, they cite that as a source. So you still have that source of clicks. but of course there’s gonna be other things and, and general data that is not gonna cite sources and, and, and it’s just gonna provide an answer directly to a user. And they have no reason to go and read your well thought out blog, blog post, you know,

[00:18:11] about that topic.

[00:18:13] And so I.

[00:18:13] think that kind of changes the game for us as marketers in that our focus needs to be less on like informational things and probably more on things that drive intent, like maybe tools or, or things where they would have to click through to take an action on your site. rather than just pure, pure knowledge and pure content.

[00:18:34] Mar marketing.

[00:18:35] Um, so, so providing

[00:18:38] value in different ways to that, to that the AI can’t do itself.

[00:18:42] Matt: Right, do you have an opinion on, on where the market’s headed with ai? derived content. In other words, I don’t know. I saw the other day some tool somebody posted that would create you a hundred blog posts and send them directly to your WordPress website, . Right? And I’m just looking at that going, what the hell are we doing?

[00:19:04] Like, how is anyone even going to, you know, you know how, how, why, how do we get into this mess? So do you have an opinion or maybe some technical knowledge on what search engines are doing to safeguard search results from its own AI driven

[00:19:20] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Yeah, well I think we kinda seen what the latest, like Google helpful content update. How they’ve put in filters that maybe we don’t understand, but seem to be doing a decent job at filtering out like a lot of these content farm type things and, recognizing even better. So, like the thing has always been create helpful content, right? Create content that people want to read and that provides value to users. And as long as you’re doing that for now, I think, good like on the ss e o side, but as I said, as as people can get that stuff from the general knowledge of AI models that’s being trained on that stuff, it’s gonna be less and less of a way to get people to your site, through creating that kind of content. I. And, so yeah, I mean, for now, like Google has said they won’t necessarily penalize something because it’s AI written. Um, really it doesn’t matter who wrote it or what wrote it, as long as it’s something that’s useful to users. so I mean, I think that’s what it comes down to. Like you need to think about the quality of the content you create.

[00:20:23] It doesn’t matter if it’s AI helping you or not. And, and keep that high and keep that useful instead of always thinking about trying to game s e o. ’cause that’s always just gonna be a back and forth battle.

[00:20:35] Matt: This launch doc spot launched six-ish months ago,

[00:20:38] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Yeah.

[00:20:39] Yeah.

[00:20:39] Matt: a and you’re not . You’re not a novice to obviously the WordPress, product space. again, looking at the pricing page 19, it ranges from 19 to 4 99 a month, $19 a month to four $99 a month for the business plan.

[00:20:53] And then below that we have an enterprise plan, 8 99 a month. understand the world of, of enterprise sales. Having worked at,Pagely for a few years selling into the enterprise, how has this shaken out for you in terms of the, the product packaging going into the WordPress space? Are there many people in the WordPress product space that are on that business and enterprise plan?

[00:21:18] How have, how have, how has this been received by, WordPress product owners?

[00:21:23] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: yeah, I mean most of my community and kind of network before this is WordPress and other WordPress product owners, so that’s kind of the first people that I was sharing this with and selling to. So we do have a lot of, WordPress businesses that are using it. One of the biggest being automatic is using it for all their products, the happiness teams. And, so yeah, it’s been interesting because this has been my first kind of true like B two B product, business to business. I feel like most, and even like in W P M U Dev, all the products we built there. A lot of, in WordPress it’s, it’s really, it’s B two C, ’cause most of your customers are like, either they’re just like, they have their own site or they’re just like, maybe have a few clients and they’re trying stuff out, you know, and so they can be very pricing sensitive.

[00:22:08] So, with this, I really didn’t necessarily target WordPress specifically and just trying to go a more traditional SaaS model. And ev I first launched the 4, 9, 9 was the enterprise plan, and then I ended up having people that wanted more enterprising features. So I said, all right, let’s make that business and then let’s make, uh, higher unquote levels above that, you know, and that’s worked

[00:22:33] out. I’ve I’ve signed a, a handful of really large ones, like in fact, The biggest one just started, I think the other yesterday as that Sony, over in

[00:22:42] Japan, which is a, yeah. Which is a huge company. And so it’s been a lot big learning experience for sure. Learning how to deal with all the requirements and security and things like that, that are required to sell to those large organizations. But we try to have like a, a plan that works for like your regular, like kinda WordPress. Product, business size, and even one that works for personal use. If you just want to do, questioning your docs question, answer with your own documentation, or people use it, if they’re scholars or, or, students or things like that. Upload their textbook and be able to ask questions about it and stuff like that, or, or,

[00:23:18] hopefully not generate answers, but

[00:23:22] Matt: man. Yeah, I, I have three young boys. the oldest is in second grade, so I can’t even imagine, I can’t imagine a world of high school homework with ai. I’ve just . It’s

[00:23:31] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Seriously, I, I was looking at a photo.

[00:23:35] Somebody used the new G P T four vision, if you’ve seen that, if they took a picture of their textbook with all math textbook, with all the, Exercises in it and just stuck it in there and said, solve this for me. And it just created all the answers for them for all these like graphs and everything in the math textbook.

[00:23:52] I was like, oh boy. This

[00:23:53] is a whole

[00:23:55] new world.

[00:23:56] Matt: I’ll, I’ll know, I’ll know when, when my kids are playing, video games in five minutes and didn’t you do your homework? He’s oh yeah, we already did it. I’m like, okay. Yeah. You used an AI bot today. You used Docs spot to do your homework, didn’t

[00:24:06] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Yeah.

[00:24:06] Matt: quickly just going back to the, to, to the enterprise and the, and the sales, process that you’ve, that you’ve been, uncovering.

[00:24:14] Has the, when you sell into the enterprise or you sell into the bigger business, not that you didn’t have experience with this in before, but is there anything there that surprised you? Was it the legal side, the onboarding side, the procurement side of enterprise, that was a surprise? Or was it more I didn’t realize this technical hurdle was gonna be here.

[00:24:32] any surprises when you started selling into the enterprise?

[00:24:35] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: yeah. I had some experience at W P M U Dev, one of our big products is campus press and so we have a huge amount of like enterprise, kind of like large universities and Ivy League and things like that. And of course they have huge bureaucracies and, and things at that level where they need all these security checkbox checked and things signed and all this stuff.

[00:24:56] So it wasn’t necessarily surprising. I haven’t dealt with the sales side of that as much, before it was mostly just like the technical security side. so I felt prepared on that part, but yeah, definitely it’s been a learning experience. Just learning. Okay. Like just the fact that you put an enterprise price up there, even though I’m not necessarily offering much of any added value, is just oh yes, we’re a big company so we need to pay that.

[00:25:22] And they assume that automatically. So I’m like,

[00:25:24] Matt: Yeah.

[00:25:26] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: I’ll just keep

[00:25:26] increasing that, that, that price there, you know, and

[00:25:30] whatever number you put there is what they think they’re gonna pay.

[00:25:32] So,

[00:25:33] Matt: Yeah. And it puts the whole like, you know, the plugin business, the, the, the typical plugin business, you know, 59 79, 1 99, right. And people are like, whoa, 1 99. I can’t believe anyone would ever buy that or pay that for a plugin. But then you get into certainly higher ed.

[00:25:51] I mean, not only are they used to paying that kind of money, but I’ll tell you something.

[00:25:55] If you ever try to sell into higher education, it takes a year, sometimes two years,

[00:26:01] just because of the cycle of, of how that, how that organization buys. They have to, they have to get all the stakeholders. They actually literally have to wait for the, for summertime to start implementing, you know, some of these products when it’s not in the heightened school year.

[00:26:16] Right. Purchasing . processes for all these different verticals are outrageous,

[00:26:21] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Yeah. What, what you’re really charging for is all the bureaucracy, all the

[00:26:24] stuff that they make you go through

[00:26:26] Matt: Yeah.

[00:26:27] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: it’s such a hassle compared to self-serve.

[00:26:30] Matt: And a lot of people don’t realize that, you know, selling into big business, I mean, you are, you probably, it starts out like this. Somebody at, you know, I’ll just use you as an example. Somebody at Sony super hyped to use this whatever. They’re like it, I. Manager lead somewhere in, in part of their organization.

[00:26:48] They, they really want to use this and they talk to you and they’re like, we’re gonna buy it. And you’re like, great, let’s talk tomorrow. And they go, okay. Procurement officer slides in like a Jedi warrior comes outta nowhere,

[00:26:58] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Mm-hmm. .

[00:26:59] Matt: And then, and then they start saying, oh, okay, let’s talk money. Let’s talk legal, let’s talk security.

[00:27:04] And then all these people come out of the woodwork and you’re like, what happened to that guy over there that said he wanted to buy it? with an ego, you know, it’s a, it’s a crazy world.

[00:27:12] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: I had to fill out like a 10 page spreadsheet in Japanese about the security, and requirements and stuff, you know, but

[00:27:21] Matt: Any other WordPress companies, uh, of note that you can talk about that, that are, that are using this?

[00:27:27] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: yeah, let’s see. I don’t know who I’m allowed to call out on the, on the website. I have, Dolly, And Dolly’s a, a WordPress hosting and they were one of our first customers and they’re using it for their frontline customer support. Uh, I know Extendi is, is using it, I think, within their plugin actually. so that’s kind of an interesting case, like you can put our widget on your website, but we have really powerful APIs so you can integrate it. Directly into your WordPress plugin dashboard or, or however you want to do it? a lot of different ways to go about it. I know like automatic ’cause they have a different happiness team for WooCommerce and one for wordpress.com and some of them are using like the chat widget ’cause that’s simple to get started and you can customize the design.

[00:28:05] Some of them are using our APIs like in a much more custom way that it’s kind of transparently integrated into their support workflow. and some people are using it like to actually like in their existing inbox. So for example, I have it hooked up to our Help Scout, which is our, like support ticket software, and it automatically writes a draft reply whenever we get like a, a request in there. And so you can do things like that. I believe Sony is using it for an internal like c r M tool. so as to provide like automatic replies and stuff, and that’s fully just using the APIs for their internal use case to write, replies to to customers, communications and things like that. So

[00:28:50] it’s very flexible.

[00:28:51] It’s makes it a challenge to figure out the best way to market it.

[00:28:54] Matt:

[00:28:54] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: because of all the different

[00:28:56] different ways it can be used and trying to figure out, okay, who is our ideal customer and, and how do we want to present this? because once you have I mean everyone knows chat, G B T, you can do so much with it, not just writing content.

[00:29:09] Matt: sure.

[00:29:10] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: so it’s kind of like once you have that custom trained on your information, then it’s like, what can’t you use it for? We’re

[00:29:17] just still discovering use cases today.

[00:29:20] Matt: And I also see in the, enterprise plan, you have some Azure OpenAI, service. I’m a fan of Claude ai. I use that quite often for writing. I find it to be a little bit more, creative with, with writing versus chat, G P T.

[00:29:36] Uh, plus I just like the fact that I, ’cause obviously I do a lot with podcasting, so I do a lot with transcripts

[00:29:41] and

[00:29:42] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: The large context. Yeah.

[00:29:43] Matt: you can paste it and I just, something about pasting it in and it just turns it into a file icon.

[00:29:49] I don’t know, something about that just makes me feel like, okay, you got this, you got this Claude in chat, c p t, it just struggles with a 30 minute plus, transcript.

[00:29:58] But anyway, the point is, is are you gonna support other, chat or other chat services?

[00:30:03] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: The plan is to, I mean, the space is moving so rapidly.

[00:30:07] Um, right now we have a lot of like open AI specific things like their function calling and stuff that we rely pretty heavily on that aren’t available on other models. so, but we’re definitely gonna be, looking into that. Yeah. hopefully there’ll be open models that Are much cheaper and, and accessible and, and almost as powerful. I know some of them,Facebook’s Lama two, it’s, it’s, nearly at the base chat G B t 3.5 level. the, the reason we haven’t done that is most of our customers are international and, a lot of those models are English only or not very good at other languages.

[00:30:45] So that’s why we’re

[00:30:46] another reason why we’re heavily open AI still.

[00:30:49] Matt: one last bonus question here. One of the questions I actually tweeted at Matt, which he didn’t answer, but I know Jetpack, I, I put a video out on the YouTube channel about jet pack’s AI features, which when I spoke to a rep at Workcamp US, they said it was powered by chat G P T.

[00:31:07] I’m curious why I don’t see more, or maybe you have an answer to this.

[00:31:11] why not some of the . LLMs from like hugging face, which if I have this right, is more open source friendly than open ai. assume like maybe automatic would wanna align with that kind of open source methodology versus an open ai, but maybe I’m not well versed in it.

[00:31:30] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Well, right now it comes down to quality and speed and cost. Right? Probably more than anything. The, the open models are not quite at the quality level that you would want for a lot of products. it might work for a simple chat bots, but it’s not good at following like instructions as well. Or for example, like the jet pack. I know, for example, they have AI in their form. And the Jetpack forms. And so you can like type in a prompt, okay, create a form that does this and then it creates this whole form. And that on the back end is definitely using like open eyes function calling. I. Which is basically a way to get structured a p i output from human text input. so that doesn’t really exist in other models. Like you can fake it by doing some fancy prompt work, but it’s very error prone because it’s not fine tuned for that. but the space is changing really fast. I mean, every month there’s a new model, a new model version. I mean, a year from now the, the landscape is gonna be completely different.

[00:32:29] So it’s a challenge to keep up with.

[00:32:32] Matt: Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. Doc Spot A I, Aaron, where else do you want folks to go to check this out or say thanks for doing the podcast.

[00:32:42] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: yeah, you can always, catch me on Twitter. It’s ugly Robot dev is my username. And, we also have kind of some fun AI stuff that, that I do, called Imagine ai. it’s m i M a J I n.ai and we have, that’s like imaging technology. So we have a WordPress plugin where you can create AI images. rate within WordPress and we also have, a really fun like children’s book generated with AI where you like upload some pictures of your child and, it actually illustrates them into the children’s book.

[00:33:14] So you get accustomed hardcover children’s book in the mail. So that’s a fun thing. We’re gonna be my wife and I made together and we’re gonna be, pushing that for the holidays. So keep that in mind. If you need a gift,

[00:33:26] Matt: Awesome. And that’s gonna be at the same, at the same website.

[00:33:28] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Yeah, imagine

[00:33:29] ai. Yeah,

[00:33:31] Matt: stuff. everyone else. Thanks for listening. Today’s the WP Minute plus. Subscribe to the newsletter, the wp minute.com/subscribe. Search for us on your favorite podcast app. If this is the first time you’re listening to this, and maybe just maybe I’ll get more into, ai.

[00:33:47] In the future. I, I don’t want it to replace my voice. I’ve tried those podcasting services

[00:33:54] still not up to snuff. I have a job for at least the next six months,

[00:33:57] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Okay. What about translation? Have you tried the translating ones?

[00:34:02] Matt: you know, I, it’s been a few months since I’ve looked at them. The last time I looked at them, they were really expensive.

[00:34:09] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: Hmm.

[00:34:09] Matt: But yeah, I mean, it, it would be wonderful to have, I know a, a handful of other services have been released where it will speak in a different language for you as well

[00:34:19] aaron-edwards_1_10-03-2023_123414: with your same voice. That’s amazing.

[00:34:21] Matt: with the same, yeah, with the same voice.

[00:34:22] and that looks interesting to me, but it’s still like I $350 an episode, , and just well, if I had more sponsors, maybe we can release a Spanish version. But until

[00:34:33] then, It’s just me, . Awesome stuff. Thanks everybody for listening and we’ll see you in the next episode.

[00:34:41] That’s it for today’s episode. If you’re a WordPress product business, and you want to get your black Friday deal in front of our audience, including a YouTube video, head to our WordPress product, black Friday placement listing on the WP minute.com. Scroll to the bottom. Go to the footer. You’ll see a little fire emoji next to the black Friday deal listing. Go ahead and click that link and you can purchase a spot in our classified listings. Get a promo video on our YouTube channel or sponsor the podcast. See the black Friday deal listing in the footer of the WP minute.com. Thanks for our to our pillar sponsors pressable and Bluehost. Thanks to our foundation. Plus sponsors the WP world without these sponsors support from our paying members and you the listener, the WP minute, wouldn’t be possible. See you in the next episode.

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