Hey Reader,

One of the most common requests I hear from clients is that they want a custom version of ChatGPT for their business that uses their knowledge.

Whether it's a chatbot on their website, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. all they want is to have it use their knowledge. So in this email, I want to teach you how to build such a thing.

Step 1: Theorycrafting

Theorycrafting is a term I learned from video games, it's basically when you just do the maths from the game and try to figure out the winning strategy/build on paper without actually playing the game.

So let's start there. You need to figure out the following things:

1/ What's the whole purpose of the chatbot?

My general rule of thumb is one task = one AI. The reason for this is performance. If you give just one task to ChatGPT, it performs pretty well. If you give it multiple, then it will perform each poorly. So decide whether it's a teacher, customer support agent, sales agent, appointment setter, etc.

2/ Where will the chatbot live? (website, IG DMs, whatsapp?)

This will be important for later, when we research integration options. The tool that I used for my chatbot is Chatbase, which currently integrates with: Zapier, Make, Slack, Wordpress, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger and can be embedded on HTML sites.

3/ What kind of knowledge does it need to have access to?

This is critical for the performance of the chatbot, without these, you will only be using the model's training data - which is the same as someone just chatting to ChatGPT on their own. So the knowledge base gives the extra value to the chatbot. For mine, it's the entire 12 hour Prompt Master AI course's video lesson transcripts.

Step 2: Preparation

A big chunk of the 40 minutes (let's say half of it) was to prepare the knowledge file. I already had the lesson transcripts in a Google Drive folder, but it was 74 separate documents.

Downloading them and uploading them to the chatbot would've been a nightmare, so I set up a quick Make scenario that would take each of these files and append them into one giant document.

74 docs vs. 1 giant doc doesn't influence the performance of the chatbot, althought some platforms (like Custom GPTs) restrict you on document numbers, others (like Chatbase) restrict you on total character counts in documents. At the same time, I also wanted to update the Prompt Master Tutor GPT, so I decided 1 giant doc is my way to go.

So for you, you need to collect these files. Keep in mind that the files' overall context will be lost, and only text is saved (so don't try to put in images or charts, they won't be loaded).

Generally speaking, print ready PDFs are the safest option for most platforms, but you can get away with .docx, .txt, .rtf files as well.

Step 3: Building

Okay, now you have your knowledge files ready, so let's start building the chatbot. From here on, I'll walk you through how to do it in Chatbase, as I think that's the easiest to use platform at the moment for this. (it's an affiliate link, so if you register, I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work!)

The first thing that Chatbase tells you to do is to upload your files. So if you've prepared them, let's do that, and then click "Create Chatbot" (on the free plan, you can create 1 chatbot with maximum of 400k characters, and you can embed into your site).

Then go to Settings ➔ AI, and here we can write the system prompt for the chatbot.

You can see my prompt below, and you can also ask my course tutor chatbot to help you with writing one for your chatbot.

For starters, I recommend starting with a simple prompt, and emphasize the use of the knowledge base to avoid hallucinations.

Then work on improving your prompt later. We just need to ship it first. Optimize later.

You can also pick your model here and the temperature settings. I went with Claude 3.5 Sonnet with 0.2 temperature.

In the playground, you can also compare two models. Currently, both GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet cost 1 credit each (same as the weaker GPT-4o mini model, so no point in using that at the moment).

See my screenshot on "What are the key elements of a prompt" question response. I just like Claude over GPT right now, personal preference. They both told roughly the same things from my files.

In the playground you can chat with your chatbot. Take it for a spin. Try to make it sweat, try to jailbreak your own system prompt, and try to break it. If it breaks, go back and adjust your prompt. Rinse and repeat.

Step 4: Deploy

Now go to Connect and either Embed (if you want it on your website) or Integrations (if you want it in your other systems).

Follow the instructions there, and test the chatbot on your website, see how well it works.

Btw, I also tried the chatbot in Hungarian, and even though the entire transcript was in English, it actually gave pretty good responses (although on the backend, its confidence score was a lot lower - 90% in English, 73% in Hungarian).

Step 5: Share your chatbot

Send it to your friends, your customers, your followers, and so on, and get them to use it, to interact with it.

So to lead by example, go to this site and try my new Prompt Master tutor chatbot trained on 170 pages of my AI knowledge.

Step 6: Reply to this email

Thank you so much for your responses from my last email. I tried to get back to all of you, I still have a few emails I didn't respond to, so I'll do that over the weekend while watching the Formula 1 Dutch GP (if it's gonna be boring).

Let me know what was the most useful for you in this email! Just hit "reply" and talk to me! ;)

Best,
Dave

Dave Talas CEO & Founder Promptmaster

P.S: Whenever you're ready, here are 4 ways I can help you:

#1: Learn LLM prompt engineering and how to build AI agents without writing any code in my Prompt Master AI Course. With over 1,400 satisfied students, this course makes you a Prompt Master. Taught at 2 universities as an accredited course.

#2: Turn ADHD into your superpower, and activate your hyperfocus on demand with the Cheatcode Bootcamp. First cohort begins September 9th (and that's when doors close too).

#3: Book me as a workshop instructor or keynote speaker for your company, your team or for your audience. I've ran many workshops on ChatGPT prompt engineering, AI for executives, use-case specific topics like AI in HR and PR, and AI agent building.

#4: Want my best students to build AI automations and agents for you? You can hire us for work, whether you have a specific problem to solve or you need someone to figure out what's a problem worth solving with AI.