Building a Chatbot Part 3: Botsonic vs CustomGPT
Nina Cialone shares her journey as she builds a chatbot for Lehigh University's student-run publication, The Brown and White - with no coding background! Follow along as she documents the process.
Photo Source: Reve Chat
I told you I’d be back soon – and this time, I have some exciting news!
In my last piece, I mentioned three areas I wanted to look further into: a quick Udemy chatbot building course, the Zapier ChatGPT integration, and a little known chatbot builder called Botsonic.
First, let’s get the boring stuff out of the way. The Udemy course only instructed on how to use a specific platform (Ideta), which was essentially a simplified version of Watson Assistant. The Zapier integration looked interesting, but as I tried to create the “Zap,” which would link my ChatGPT account to a Slack channel, I kept receiving error messages telling me that I had used up my OpenAI API quota. Turns out, you have to pay extra to be able to link like that, so I decided to break from this approach until I tested out Botsonic.
This is where the exciting stuff begins. After hours and hours of research and various obstacles and roadblocks, I tried to keep my expectations low with Botsonic. After all, when I did a Google search on the platform, there weren’t many articles or reviews about the product. I found a few articles that let me know Writesonic, the platform that hosts Botsonic, is an India-based generative AI servicer that has embarked on a “quest for an all-in-one AI engagement platform,” according to India Technology News. On May 11, Writesonic announced Botsonic, a completely no-code chatbot builder that leverages GPT-4 technology and boasts the ability to train on personalized data in various forms. This chatbot building format is a sharp contrast to the traditional rule-based chatbots that most “no-code” courses (including the one I took from IBM!) teach a user to build, which require a multitude of flows that must be set up manually.
I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try out this platform, as it seemed to be exactly what we were looking for, so I purchased a one month subscription and began building a trial bot. The first thing I did was upload various PDFs and PPTs from throughout my college career. After the bot had trained on them, I asked it questions regarding the content of those documents. Let me tell you, I was nothing short of stunned. The process of uploading files and letting the bot train on them took less than five minutes, and the chatbot was then easily able to summarize the documents and answer specific questions about the content of my work.
With that first trial run going smoothly, I decided to test out the Sitemap feature. I built a partial sitemap of The Brown and White’s website using XML Sitemaps and uploaded it to a new bot in Botsonic. I then asked this new bot questions about some recent articles published in The Brown and White, including key points, who wrote it and when it was published. I found that it took a little while to figure out the best way to phrase my question in order to get the answer I was looking for, but this is a learning curve that comes with using any generative AI platform, and the Botsonic chatbot was ultimately able to provide correct responses to almost all of my queries. At this point, I was truly awe-struck by its capabilities, and even further impressed by the wide variety of customization options available to make your bot fit your brand.
“Our mission is to make cutting-edge AI technology accessible and user-friendly, enabling our users to create powerful, personalized, and seamless experiences that propel their businesses into the future.”
- Samanyou Garg, Founder of Writesonic
You might think that the story is over now, as I found a no-code, personalizable chatbot builder that far exceeded my expectations. I thought so too, until I sat down to write this very article, and at the same time received a promotional email from a platform called CustomGPT. After only reading its name, I figured I had to check this out, and I’m quite glad I did. CustomGPT is extremely similar to Botsonic in that it is powered by GPT-4, allows users to upload their own data for the bot to train on and was also featured on Product Hunt. Even its pricing is similar as both companies charge $49 per month for a basic subscription. However, CustomGPT has a few key differences that made its features stand out to me.
Users have the ability to upload audio and video files. This is critical for a multimedia publication such as The Brown and White that features videos and podcasts regularly.
When providing the user with specific information, the bot has a “Where did this answer come from?” button beneath its text box, which when clicked will cite the source(s) of its response from the data that you’ve uploaded.
The company heavily emphasizes that its bots avoid hallucinations, which is the tendency of generative AI to make up facts and present them convincingly to users.
The CEO of CustomGPT was also one of 30 AI startups to present at MIT's “Imagination in Action” AI Conference on June 30, and it turns out that CustomGPT has actually been implemented at MIT!
Feeling thoroughly convinced of this product’s merit, I then purchased a month’s subscription of CustomGPT and ran the same tests that I did with Botsonic, once again receiving spectacular results! I even uploaded both a short audio clip and a video clip, and the bot was able to answer questions based on the audio content of both files.
With the limited amount of information I was able to find online about the company, it was difficult to pinpoint when this platform had initially been released. What I did find was that CustomGPT joined Twitter this past February and made the first blog post on their website in the same month, leading me to believe that this product had been released at the start of 2023.
I must point out that these are my findings as of mid-July, 2023. With the rapid exponential growth of generative AI that we are currently living through, who knows what similar platforms will emerge within the next month or year, and what other remarkable capabilities they will include. Right now, I’m super excited to share what I’ve discovered about these two platforms, Botsonic and CustomGPT, which make generative AI not only accessible without any programming knowledge, but also easy to personalize to your own needs. Using one of these platforms, any individual, company or university has the power of GPT-4 at its fingertips, which when combined with their own data can dramatically improve the efficiency of many research-based tasks.
Before I go, here’s some housekeeping stuff regarding the steps that you can expect to hear about in my next piece.
We’re currently scheduling a meeting with the advisor and editor-in-chief of The Brown and White to iron out the specifics of what we need this chatbot to have access to and how it will be used. We’ll also decide which platform we feel is better suited to our specific needs.
Once all of that is finalized, I’ll start building the chatbot itself and have a select few people help me test it along the way!
This journey has certainly had its ups and downs so far, and I’m sure that there will be more to come, but I’m sincerely looking forward to continuing to share my process and discoveries here at Don’t Count Us Out Yet. Stay tuned for another update soon…
Best,
Nina for the Don’t Count Us Out Yet Team