Visitors chat with your collection in two ways: a floating button on every page, and chat panels you place in pages.
The floating button
Tick Floating button in Chatbot > Settings. A chat button appears in the bottom right corner of every public page; it opens a panel where visitors type a question and press Enter (Shift+Enter for a new line).
A chat panel in a page
Put the [chatbot] shortcode in a simple page, an exhibit page's text, or anywhere your theme shows text with shortcodes:
[chatbot]
[chatbot heading="Ask about the letters"]
[chatbot heading="Ask about the paintings" collection="3,5"]
| Attribute | What it does |
|---|---|
heading |
A heading above the panel. Default: the chat heading from the settings. |
collection |
Collection IDs, separated by commas: answers use only evidence from their items, files and the collections themselves. Simple pages and exhibit pages have no collection, so they are left out. |
Answers
Each question is embedded and compared with the index; the closest chunks become the evidence, numbered [1], [2] and so on, and the chat model answers from them only. The answer cites its evidence in brackets: each citation links to a source below the answer, with its title, a link to its page and a passage. Only cited sources are listed.
When the evidence does not hold the answer, the model says it does not know rather than guess (the instructions to the model say so; you can change them in the settings).
Private items, files of private items, private collections, unpublished simple pages and pages of private exhibits are never indexed, and a record that becomes private is taken out of the index at once. Chat and search also check each source again before showing it.
Errors visitors may see
| Message | Why |
|---|---|
| "Rate limit exceeded. Please try again shortly." | The visitor sent more than the allowed requests a minute. |
| "Please log in to use the chat." | Signed-in users only is on. |
| "The chat service is temporarily unavailable." | OpenAI or Turso failed, or a key is missing: the log says which. |