AI Assistant Overview

The AI Assistant is designed to understand intent and reasoning. It dialogues with users to recommend and guide them based on their needs.

An example of question that can be made:

• "What’s best for hiking in the rain?"

The assistant would respond with a selection of recommended products:

• "These waterproof boots provide traction and support."

The greatest advantage of this Discovery product is to make the customer experience simple by giving direct advice, understanding the user intent and offering a personalized suggestion.

The assistant understands natural language, compares products, and answers customer questions using your product data feed and information uploaded, we will go more in depth below. It also adapts to your search layer look and feel, matching its design.

Prerequisites

Before configuring the AI Assistant, ensure:

1. You have an active Store and Search Engine in your Doofinder Admin Panel (products must be already indexed).

2. Your data feed includes the fields you want the Assistant to use when recommending products (e.g.: title, price, best_price, color, categories, brand, description, dfid, etc).

3. Field names in your feed are properly mapped to Doofinder’s normalized fields, especially if you use custom field names. You can use Field Name Mapping for this.

4. Ensure that the script is updated to the single script, it looks like this on your HTML. With that, Bubble and the mobile version of the AI can work correctly.

5. Finally, you should create a new Layer, as the following message suggests:

Configuration Steps AI Assistant

In the following steps, you will learn how to configure your AI assistant. Notice that this configuration is per store:

Assistant main icon

You have the option to upload your own AI icon. Modify the appearance of the Assistant to better align with your brand identity. The icon will be displayed on the home page, within the assistant tab, and next to the reply messages in the chat.

Follow the image format specifications given:

• File types: PNG, JPG, JPEG, GIF, SVG
• Maximum size: 2 MB
• Recommended: 32x32 pixels size

Show AI on initial

If the toggle is enabled, the AI assistant will be shown from the moment the search box is clicked on, alongside the initial results. Otherwise, you will need to first type something in the layer.

Show Banner after filters

If the toggle is enabled, the assistant will be shown at the bottom of the filters, otherwise, it will be on top of it.

Conversational hints

If activated, it suggests common responses to users to keep the conversation flowing. It makes it easier for continuing interaction by simply clicking on the answers, avoiding typing, as it asks follow-up questions, and explore products.

See the following example with "Scooters":

Assistant Fields

Here you can choose the feed fields used by the assistant to recommend products, they must be separated by comma, see example below:

• title, price, best_price, color, categories, brand, description, dfid, etc.

However, if the box is empty, we will use all fields in your data feed. The purpose of this is to add fields when you need to control what you want the AI assistant to read instead.

Comparison Fields

In the Comparison Fields you can opt for feed fields that may be shown in the comparison table, separated by comma, see example below:

• brand, categories, color, description.

The system will use the selected Comparison Fields to show a side-by-side comparison of the products, using only the fields you defined. However, if the box is empty, the system will pick the most relevant fields in your data feed.

Chat bubble

Show chat bubble

You can enable it to draw your customer's attention to the AI Assistant beyond the standard interface on the layer. Once activated, the bubble will appear on all website pages, apart from the checkout view, providing users with a direct entry point to open the conversational layer.

You can choose the positioning of the bubble:

Vertical offset

Shift the bubble upward or downward. Negative values move it downward.

Bubble background color

To change the chat bubble background color use hexadecimal format.

Send bubble message

The bubble will send a message to make it more noticeable to users. If enabled, customers will be directly addressed on your web by the assistant.

Custom text

Customize the messages shown on and by your AI Assistant. And, you can switch the Search Engine using the option on the right side of the Custom Text section: :

Bubble message: customize it when it addresses the customer directly, “Need help? I'm your assistant.”

Assistant custom name: a name can be assigned to your Assistant, instead of the default “AI assistant” title, you can customize it to your needs:

AI assistant Introductory message: refers to the message “Hi, how can I help you today?”

Suggestion 1, Suggestion 2 and Suggestion 3: add your own suggestions, see real case example:

You can use for example, your top searches data to turn it into questions.

Banner title: you can change the “Need help?” title.

Banner button text: to change the green button of the banner.

Banner description: customize the text “Easily find the ideal product…”

See below:

Chat logs & Stats

How the AI Assistant performs in your store - Stats

A built-in stats panel shows how customers interact with the AI, including chat activity and search behaviour, giving you valuable insights into what users are looking for.

• AI assistant sessions: the number of sessions. The same user might have different sessions if the chat is used after one hour.
• Clicked products: amount of products clicked after interacting with the AI assistant chat.
• % of sessions lead to a purchase: percentage of interactions that ended on purchasing a product.
• min average per conversation: average conversation duration (in minutes).

On the top right-hand side of the screen you can narrow down the information using the calendar functionality to see the stats per period as well as per device.

Chat Log Filters

In the Chat Logs, you can filter the interactions your customers have had with the AI Assistant, specifically under the section Analyze how your users use the assistant.

You can also filter the conversations by date using the calendar, as well as device:

The filters also include a search bar where you can search for specific details.

Other filters:

Answer type: Any answer type, Answered, or Unknown.

• Answered: means that the AI Assistant was able to identify the correct answer for your customer query.
• Unknown: the AI Assistant was not able to answer properly, but still could attempt to point out a direction, or it won’t be able to reply at all.

Once filtered you will be able to see:

• Conversation: ID of the conversation.
• Question: the transcript of your customers interactions.
• Answer: the answer given by the AI assistant.
• Date: date of the conversation.

Knowledge Base

The AI Assistant primarily gets all information from the data feed of your products, however, with this functionality, you can increment its expertise adding up any type of information about the store, shipping and payments methods, contact, address, policies etc. The Knowledge Base is the section where you can upload it.

Real case example:

• If a customer asks how to contact your store, the chat will pull the details from the Knowledge Base and display the contact information with a clickable URL or button:

The data format

Data source: the limit is 50 text sources and each text can contain up to 35,000 characters.

Data Training: up to 5 training attempts per day are allowed without a waiting period.

How to upload it?

At the moment you can only add the text directly into the text box as you can see below.

1. Gather all important information.
2. Convert it on a clean and organized text (with titles and sections, if applicable).

3. Copy and paste it into the text box.

   

4. Once you have finished adding all prompts, click on “Save & train”. This might take a few minutes.

Languages

The configured texts inherit the language defined for the layer in your admin panel of Doofinder. Once in the AI assistant you can interact in any language, and the chat will automatically detect it and respond accordingly.

Best Practices

• Include the suggestions: this functionality allows you the opportunity to better guide your customers.
• Enable Conversational hints: to improve the user experience, especially on mobile.
• Enable the AI Assistant Chat Bubble: this will give your customers the ability to access the chat from any page on your website.
• Knowledge Base: upload any kind of pertinent info, such as FAQs about payments and shippings, it helps your AI Assistant to cover up those questions.

More info about the product can also be found here in our Discovery section: https://www.doofinder.com/en/ai-assistant