AI assistant widget
Overview
Sitefinity AI Assistant (SAIA) serves as a conversational interface — an intelligent chatbot — designed to enhance the visitor experience by providing intuitive access to your site's content.
You use the AI Assistant, for example, to enable your visitors to engage in natural language interactions in streamlined self-service experiences, including dynamic FAQ and Q&A content, thus reducing friction and improving user satisfaction.
Sitefinity AI Assistant leverages a Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technique, combined with the latest large language models (LLMs) and a vector database provided by Microsoft Azure. To use the AI Assistant, no special integration or configuration is required. You use an out-of-the-box AI assistant widget to surface the chatbot UI in your sites without any programming.
PREREQUISITES:
- Sitefinity AI Assistant is available only in Sitefinity Cloud.
- You must have purchased the Sitefinity AI Assistant add-on.
- The AI assistant widget for MVC frontend is available starting with Sitefinity 15.3.8526 and newer versions.
- To comply with data residency requirements and ensure that your customers' data handling is fully compliant with the applicable local laws, the AI Assistant is available only when your subscription is provisioned in the US and EU regions.
This ensures data residency - any data stored at rest or processed for inference in these regions is ensured to remain in the location of your deployment. - If your subscription is provisioned in a different region and you want to use the AI Assistant, contact the Sitefinity Support team.
For information about the supported Sitefinity Cloud regions, see Architecture.
To learn how to set up and configure an AI Assistant, see Sitefinity AI Assistant.
Use the AI assistant widget on your site
PREREQUISITES: To use the
AI assistant widget out of the box, the following is required:
- You use the MVC frontend technology.
- You have at least one AI Assistant that is already configured as described in Sitefinity AI Assistant » Set up and configure Sitefinity AI Assistant.
Place the AI assistant widget on a page
To place the AI assistant widget on a page, perform the following:
- Log in to your Sitefinity backend.
- Create or navigate to an existing MVC page.
- From the right panel, drag the AI assistant widget to the page.
RESULT: The AI assistant widget is placed and ready to be configured.
Configure an existing AI assistant widget
To configure an existing AI assistant widget, click Edit.
The AI assistant page opens, where you can configure the following:
- Select an already configured AI Assistant using the Select an AI assistant dropdown.
- Give a nickname of the AI assistant.
Your site visitors will see this nickname every time the AI assistant generates an answer. - Customize the welcome message for your site visitors.
The AI assistant displays the greeting message when a site visitor opens the chat window for the first time.
By default, the AI assistant uses the greeting message that the site administrator has configured upon creating the AI assistant you are using. - Set an avatar of the AI assistant.
Your site visitors see this image every time the AI assistant generates an answer. - Configure how the AI assistant will be displayed on the page:
- If you select Display overlay mode, your site visitors will see an icon in the lower-right corner of the page. Clicking this icon opens a chat window.
You can set custom icons for opening and closing the chat window. - If you select Display inline mode, the chat window will appear directly on the page, integrated with other widgets and using the space allocated for the AI assistant widget.
- Optionally, you can set the HTML element ID that hosts the chat UI. To do this, set the name in the Container ID field.
- Configure the message box where your site visitors enter their prompts. You can set the following:
- Placeholder text - the text displayed as a tip inside the input box. This text will be replaced by whatever text the visitor enters.
- Notice - the text visible at the bottom of the chat UI, which reminds the site visitors that they are interacting with AI and the responses are generated by AI.