Sitefinity AI Assistant

Sitefinity AI Assistant (SAIA) serves as a conversational interface - an intelligent chatbot - designed to enhance visitor experience by providing intuitive access to your site content.
You use the AI Assistant, for example, to enable your visitors to use 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 utilize this capability, 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.

In a multisite deployment, you create the AI Assistant on a specific site. The AI Assistant can use the following content of the site, on which you have created it:

• the content of your pages and your content items
• Word and PDF documents stored in your libraries.

The AI Assistant cannot access images and other media content stored in DAM libraries or third-party integrations, such as Cloudinary and Frontify.

The AI Assistant can access Sitefinity content that is in the Published state and publicly available on the site. Content in the Draft state is excluded.
Newly published content becomes accessible after a short time (typically, a few seconds). Content reindexing is performed automatically.

To start using Sitefinity AI Assistant, first, a site administrator creates and configures the behavior of a new AI assistant. Then, a content editor places the AI assistant widget on at least one page or a page template.

Message quota

As a cloud-based service, the AI Assistant usage billing is based on the number of end-user messages. When your account reaches specific stages in your quota (75%, 90%, and 100%), you receive a notification. For more information, see User notifications.
Additionally, the System status widget, which you can add to your Sitefinity Dashboard backend, is updated to remind you of these thresholds.
Your site visitors will receive a warning if they try using the AI Assistant after your message quota limit has been reached.
To increase your quota, contact Sitefinity Sales.

PREREQUISITES: You must have full Administrator privileges in your Sitefinity backend.

Create a new AI assistant

To create a new AI assistant, perform the following:

1. Log in to your Sitefinity backend with full Administrator privileges.
2. (Optional) If you are using a multisite configuration, switch to the site whose content you want to expose through the AI Assistant.
3. Click Administration » AI assistants.
   The AI assistants page opens.
4. To create a new AI assistant, click Create AI assistant.
   The Creating AI assistant... dialog opens.
5. In Assistant name, enter the name of the AI assistant.
   This name is visible only in the backend and helps you and the content editors distinguish it among all configured AI assistants.
6. In Description, enter an explanation about the purpose of the AI assistant and its usage.
   The description is added for your convenience and is only visible in the backend.
7. In Instructions to assistant, enter the system prompt for the LLM powering this AI assistant.
   You use the system prompt to drive the behavior of the LLM.
   For example, you can set the conversation tone - friendly, authoritative, or professional - and instruct the LLM to ask users for additional clarification when certain conditions are met.
8. In Greeting message, enter the welcome message for your site visitors.
   The AI assistant displays the greeting message when the site visitors open their chat window for the first time.
9. Under the Notifications section, some default notification messages for your site visitors are preset. Optionally, you can customize these notifications as needed.
   You can set the following messages:
   • AI messages limit reached
     Your site visitors see this message when the message quota for the AI Assistant has been reached. For more information, see Message quota above.
   • Prompts rate limit reached
     Your site visitors see this message when the built-in protection against denial-of-service attacks has been triggered. They need to wait a little bit before attempting to use the AI assistant.
   • General error
     Any other problem with the AI assistant.
10. Click Create.
    After you have successfully created an AI assistant, you see its AI assistant properties page. You can adjust the AI assistant properties or safely navigate back using the arrow in the upper-left corner.

Manage an existing AI assistant

To manage your existing AI assistants, perform the following:

1. Log in to your Sitefinity backend with full Administrator privileges.
2. (Optional) If you are using a multisite configuration, switch to the site whose content you want to expose through the AI assistant.
3. Click Administration » AI assistants.
   The AI assistants page opens, displaying all configured AI assistants for the currently selected site.

For each AI assistant, you can:

• View the number of conversations your visitors have had with it.
• Explore all the conversations and their messages.
  To do this, either click the number under the Conversations column or click  (Actions) » Conversations.li>
• Configure the properties of the AI assistant, such as its instructions (the system prompt), the greeting message, or its notifications for site visitors.
  To do so, click (Actions) » Properties.
• Delete an existing AI assistant.
  To do so, click (Actions) » Delete, then confirm your choice.
  
  NOTE: When you delete an AI assistant, all visitor conversations with it are also deleted.
  To prevent your site visitors from receiving an error message, after you delete an AI assistant, you must also reconfigure all AI Assistant widgets that are using it.

Place the AI assistant widget on a page

To place the AI assistant widget on a page, perform the following:

1. Log in to your Sitefinity backend.
2. Create or navigate to an existing ASP.NET Core page.
3. If needed, add a Section widget.
4. Click Add widget here...
5. From the right panel, select the AI assistant widget.

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 the Select an assistant link.
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.