AI Assistant (Site AI)

The AI Assistant puts real AI inside your published site — a chatbot, smart forms, summaries, translation, image understanding, document Q&A, even image generation — with no API keys and no providers to set up. The AI runs on Genesis and uses your credits.

It’s not just a chat widget: under the hood it’s a primitive (window.estageAI) the builder can wire into anything.

Example prompts

Just describe what you want in chat — no special syntax needed. The assistant understands plain language and wires the feature:

• “add a support chatbot that answers from our shipping & returns policy”
• “on the contact form, sort each message into Sales / Support / Billing”
• “auto-generate a short title for each user post from its text”
• “add a ‘TL;DR’ button that summarizes this article”
• “let visitors translate this page into Spanish”
• “when someone uploads a photo, write its alt text”
• “add a widget where visitors drop a PDF and ask questions about it”
• “generate an avatar from the user’s name on sign-up”

The prompt above…	…wires
support chatbot	A floating chatbot answering from your knowledge text
sort each message	A smart form that classifies every submission
auto-generate a title	Title generation on submit
TL;DR button	One-click summary
translate this page	On-demand translation
write its alt text	Image understanding (vision)
drop a PDF	Document Q&A
generate an avatar	Image generation

Under the hood each is a call to window.estageAI — see the real code for every one in What you can build with it.

Add a chatbot — step by step

The most common use. The fast path is one chat message:

1. Ask for it in chat, describing what it should know and do — for example, “add a friendly support chatbot that answers from our shipping, returns, and hours info”:

   This does three things at once: turns the assistant on, sets a starting persona, and wires the floating chat widget onto your site — no separate steps.

2. Add your knowledge so answers are accurate. Open Settings → AI Assistant → Knowledge / context and paste the facts the bot should use:

   Hours: Mon–Fri 9am–6pm EST. Free shipping over $50. Returns within 30 days
   with receipt. Support: help@acme.com.

3. Style the widget in the same tab → Chatbot widget: set the name (“Acme Assistant”), accent color, greeting (“Hi! 👋 How can I help?”), and a few starter prompts (“What are your hours?”, “Track my order”, “Talk to a human”).

4. Pick a model — Fast for everyday support (snappy, cheap), Smart when answers need more reasoning.

5. Set a monthly cap so visitor usage stays within budget (see billing).

6. Publish — the chatbot is live for your visitors.

That’s it. Want changes later? Edit any field in Settings (saves instantly), or ask in chat: “make the chatbot greeting shorter”, “move the chat bubble to the bottom-left”.

Prefer to start from Settings?

You can also flip Settings → AI Assistant → Enable AI on this site first, configure the widget, then ask the builder “add the chat widget to my site”. Same result — the chat message just does both in one go.

Tip

The bot only knows what you put in Persona + Knowledge (and what the visitor types). It doesn’t read your whole site automatically — so paste the FAQs, policies, and details you want it to answer from.

When the assistant is on, the window.estageAI helper is available across your site for all the other features too. Turn it off and it’s a clean uninstall — no leftover code.

The Settings → AI Assistant tab

Control	What it does
Enable AI on this site	Master on/off.
Model	Fast — quick and economical, best for chat and most tasks. Smart — stronger reasoning, costs more credits per call.
Persona & instructions	The assistant’s system prompt — its role, tone, and rules. Never shown to visitors.
Knowledge / context	Plain text the AI can reference when answering — your hours, shipping policy, product details, FAQs.
Chatbot widget	The floating chatbot’s name, accent color, greeting, and up to a handful of starter prompts (suggestion chips).
Image generation	A separate toggle for window.estageAI.image() — off by default because image generation costs more.
Monthly spending limit	A cap, in credits, on what the assistant can spend per month (default 500; can be unlimited).
Usage	Credits spent this month, call count, and how close you are to the cap.

Changes save immediately — no rebuild.

A good setup

Persona: “You are a friendly support agent for Acme Co. If you don’t know something specific, say so and suggest contacting us.” · Knowledge: paste your hours, shipping policy, and top FAQs · Greeting: “Hi! 👋 How can I help?” · Starters: “What are your hours?”, “Shipping info”, “Talk to a human”. The persona and knowledge are what make answers accurate and on-brand.

How billing works

There are no API keys — the AI runs on Genesis’s platform key, and each call spends your (the project owner’s) credits:

• Fast costs less per call than Smart; image generation costs the most (hence its own toggle).
• Anonymous visitors trigger calls that spend your credits — that’s why the guards exist:
  • Monthly cap — once the month’s credit cap is hit, the assistant stops until next month (or until you raise it).
  • Per-visitor rate limit — caps how fast any single visitor can fire calls.
  • If your balance can’t cover a call, it’s declined — you’re never charged for a failed call.

The Usage panel shows spend, call count, and cap progress so there are no surprises.

Models

• Fast — Claude Haiku. Snappy and cheap; great for chat and routine tasks.
• Smart — Claude Sonnet. Stronger reasoning for trickier work; more credits per call.

Vision (image understanding), document Q&A, and image generation are supported on top of the text models.

Limits

• Best for text, classification, vision, document Q&A, and image generation — see the examples.
• It answers from its persona + knowledge text + what the visitor sends — there’s no automatic indexing of your whole site yet (RAG/embeddings, voice, and a full conversation log are on the roadmap).
• Reasonable input caps apply (long text is truncated; very large images/PDFs are rejected).

Next: What you can build with it →