Getting started

Updated 24 October 2026

This guide takes you from a brand new chatbot to one that answers your customers. You don't need any technical knowledge. Steps 1, 2, 3 and 8 are enough for a working chatbot; come back to the others whenever you are ready.

Create a chatbot
Add your knowledge
Shape how it answers
Choose the model
Connect your tools
Draw your customer flows, if you need them
Try it
Put it on your site
Add chat apps
Watch it and improve it

1. Create a chatbot

On your dashboard, press New chatbot and give it a name, such as your company's name or “Support”. The name is just for you, so you can tell your chatbots apart. Your customers won't see it unless the chatbot mentions it.

Your new chatbot starts as a draft. While it is a draft, only you can talk to it, inside the dashboard, so you can set it up and test it in peace. Nobody else sees it until you put it live in step 8.

Down the left side you'll see the chatbot's sections: Overview at the top, then Knowledge to Evaluate in three groups (Build, Launch and Improve), and Settings near the bottom. This guide goes through them in the same order.

2. Add your knowledge

Every chatbot needs to know about the business it speaks for. The AI behind it already knows a lot about the world in general, but nothing about you: what you sell, what it costs, when you are open, how returns work. Your knowledge base is where you teach it. You add your own documents and web pages, and the chatbot answers your customers from them, not from guesses.

A good way to start is to think of the questions your customers ask most, and add whatever already answers them. For example:

An online shop: product pages, the delivery and returns policy, size guides.
A software company: help articles, the pricing page, setup guides.
A clinic or a salon: your services and prices, opening hours, how to book.

Under Knowledge there are four ways to add it:

Files: upload PDF, plain text, Markdown or HTML files. On the Hobby plan you can add up to 10 MB in total.
Website: enter your website's address and press Fetch pages. ChatFrom finds your pages, you tick the ones you want, and they are added. When your site changes, add the page again to update it. Pages that haven't changed cost nothing. To crawl only part of a site, list paths under Include paths or Exclude paths, up to 20 of each: /help/* takes every page under /help, since * stands for anything, and every other character stands for itself.
Text: paste in anything that isn't written down anywhere else, like your opening hours or a short policy.
Q&A: write a question and the exact answer you want the chatbot to give. This is handy for the questions you get every day, and for anything your documents explain badly.

Google Docs: press Connect Google once, then Choose documents and pick them in Google's own window. ChatFrom can open only the documents you pick. To bring in a change, choose the document again.

Notion: press Connect Notion, and in Notion's own window choose the pages ChatFrom may read. Back on the Notion tab, tick the pages to add and press Add. ChatFrom can open only the pages you share, and changes nothing in Notion. To bring in a change, add the page again; to share other pages, press Choose pages in Notion.

Every answer shows which of your sources it came from. A web page opens in a new tab, and a file opens to the passage the answer used. Your customers can check it, and if an answer is ever wrong, you can see where it came from and fix it there.

If a source contains text that reads like instructions to an AI, such as “ignore your instructions” or hidden characters, the Knowledge page warns you and shows what it found. Your chatbot reads your sources as information, never as orders, but if you didn't write that text, remove the source or fix the page it came from.

How sources are split

Your chatbot doesn't read a whole document for every question. ChatFrom cuts each source into small pieces, and when a question comes in, the chatbot reads only the few pieces that fit it best. The standard way of cutting works well for help pages and short articles, so most people never need to change it.

If your documents are long or unusual, such as contracts, a book or product manuals, open Change on How sources are split, then Need help?. Describe your documents in a sentence or two and press Set it up for me, and ChatFrom picks the settings for you. Sources you added before keep their old pieces until you cut them again, which the card offers to do with one click.

3. Shape how it answers

Next, tell your chatbot how to behave: who it works for, who it talks to, what tone to use, and what it should and shouldn't do. You write this under Behaviour, as instructions the chatbot reads before every answer. You may hear these called the system prompt.

You don't have to write them from scratch. Open Need help? at the top, describe your business and what you want the chatbot to do, and press Write my setup. ChatFrom writes the instructions and fills in the settings below them. Nothing is saved until you have read it all and pressed save, so you can change anything first. This uses a few credits from your monthly allowance, and it tells you how many before you start.

If you prefer, you can write the instructions yourself or start from a template. Either way, it's worth going through the settings below them:

Personality: how formal or friendly it sounds, and how much detail it gives.
Language: it answers in the visitor's own language, unless you choose one.
When it does not know: what it says when your knowledge has no answer, and whether it then passes the conversation to your team.
Guardrails: topics it should politely decline.
Example answers: a few questions with the answers you would give, so it learns your style.
Welcome and suggested questions: the first message visitors see when they open the chat, and a few questions they can tap.

4. Choose the model

The model is the AI that writes your chatbot's answers. Under Model you can choose from many models. Each one shows how many credits an answer uses and roughly how many answers a month your plan gives you with it, so you can compare. Larger models handle hard questions better but use more of your monthly credits for each answer. Smaller ones are quicker and cheaper.

If you're not sure, keep the model your chatbot starts with for now; you can change it at any time. You'll also find a few settings for how varied and how long answers can be, and under Advanced, how the chatbot searches your knowledge. You can leave those as they are.

If the model you chose ever can't be used, for example because its provider stops serving it, your customers are answered with another model from the same provider, when it offers one, rather than turned away. Their answers never come from a provider you did not choose. The small steps around an answer, such as turning a question into a search, use OpenAI's models. In Try it you see the reason instead, so you can choose another model.

5. Connect your tools

Knowledge lets your chatbot answer questions. Tools let it do things for your customers, such as checking an order, booking a meeting or passing the conversation to your team. The chatbot decides by itself when a conversation needs a tool, and every time it uses one, you can see it in the conversation log. Your customers see only which tool is at work, never what it was sent or what it found.

Built in

Under Tools, three are ready to switch on:

Hand off to a person: when a customer asks for a person, the chatbot passes the conversation to your team by email, Slack or a ticket. When it can't help, it offers to, and does once the customer agrees. Hand-offs go to a new email address once someone at it has confirmed the link ChatFrom sends it; until then they go to the address you sign in with.
Callback requests: a customer can ask for a call back, at a time when you take calls. You set those hours on its card. Requests are listed at the top of Conversations, and you are told by the email or Slack webhook you set for hand-offs under Behaviour.
Memory: it remembers what a customer told it before, so they don't have to repeat themselves next time. It only remembers people it can recognise when they come back: in chat apps, and on your website when Remember returning visitors is on.

Connections

You can also connect the services you already use. Each one has its own guide that walks you through it:

Shopify: customers can check where their order is, with the tracking link, and ask for a return, which you then approve in your store.
Stripe: customers can see, cancel or restart their subscription, once they have confirmed their email address.
Google Sheets: every lead, booking or request is added as a new row in a sheet of your own.
Cal.com and Calendly: the chatbot offers your free times and books the meeting.
Your API: for developers. The chatbot can call your own system, and the keys it needs stay safely on our server.
Your tool server: for developers. If you run an MCP server, the chatbot can use its tools on behalf of your signed-in users.

6. Draw your customer flows, if you need them

Most chatbots never need this step. Out of the box, your chatbot handles every message the same way: it looks in your knowledge, writes an answer, and uses one of your tools whenever it needs to. This is the Default loop, and it works well for most businesses.

A Workflow is a visual editor for your customer flows, with a path for every scenario. You draw the steps like a flowchart, and the chatbot follows them. For example, you may want it to always ask for the order number before it looks up an order, or to pass every refund request straight to a person.

Under Workflow, choose Workflow. You start from the default loop's steps, so you build on what already works.
Add steps, or start from a template. A Condition step works out what the visitor wants and sends each kind of request its own way. Ask the Visitor asks a question, with buttons to tap or a box to fill in. Tool Call uses one of your tools, and Human Handoff passes the conversation to a person.
Or add a ready-made path, which brings every step for one kind of request at once: Orders (Shopify), Subscriptions (Stripe), Save a lead (Google Sheets), Book a meeting (Cal.com or Calendly), Call-back booking and Hand-off to a person. Each one works once its tool is connected or switched on under Tools.
Save. Nothing changes for your customers until you do. If you replace a workflow later, the old one is kept under Earlier versions, so you can bring it back. The newest 20 are kept.

7. Try it

Before your customers meet your chatbot, have a chat with it yourself. Press Try it at the top of any chatbot page. It opens a chat with your chatbot exactly as it is right now, even while it is still a draft.

Ask the questions your customers usually ask, and look at each answer and the sources under it. If something is off, go back to Knowledge or Behaviour, change it, and try again.

8. Put it on your site

When you are happy with it, it's time to put it in front of your customers. Under Deploy there are four steps:

Allowed domains: enter your website's address, such as example.com; its subdomains, such as shop.example.com, are included. The chatbot only works on the sites you list, so nobody else can put it on theirs: on any other site, the bubble does not appear at all. Your site needs to use https, which almost every site does (localhost works too, for trying it out).
Appearance: choose its colour, how it waits on your page and how the message box looks. It can wait as a Bubble, a round button in a corner, or as an Input bar: a bar of frosted glass across the foot of the page, where your suggested questions take turns, typed in word by word, and visitors can type a question straight away; the chat then grows up out of the bar as a pane of smoky glass. Bar position puts the bar on the left, in the center or on the right, and Placeholder texts are up to four lines of your own that take turns in it instead of your suggested questions. A visitor who taps the page beside the open chat folds it down into a small bar that says “Continue conversation”. The “Powered by ChatFrom” line can be turned off on the Business plan. Below that are the switches for what visitors get. Remember returning visitors lets the chatbot know a visitor when they come back. In the EU this needs the visitor's consent, so turn it on only if your site asks for it, for example in its cookie banner. Visitors can attach files lets them send a file or a photo, such as an invoice, a contract or a picture of a damaged item: the chatbot reads it and answers questions about it. Visitors can download the chat lets them save the conversation as a text file; it is on unless you turn it off. Show sources under answers shows each answer's documents and pages, with a number in the text for each; turn it off and visitors get the answers alone, on your site, the share link and in chat apps, while you still see the sources in Conversations.
Website widget: copy the short piece of code and paste it into your website, just before </body>. Most website builders have a setting for adding code like this. If someone else looks after your site, send it to them; it only takes a minute.
Go live: from now on, your chatbot answers visitors on your website, on its share link and in any chat apps you have connected. Press Take offline whenever you want to turn it back into a draft.

You also get a Share link: a page of its own with your chatbot on it. Send it to someone or put it in an email, which is handy if you don't have a website or want to share the chatbot quickly.

Under the chat, on your site and on the share page, visitors see “You're chatting with an AI assistant”. The EU AI Act says people must be told when they are talking to an AI, unless it is already obvious. If your chat makes that plain another way, for example in the chatbot's name or its welcome message, you can turn off Tell visitors it's an AI assistant.

If a visitor reloads the page or moves to another page of your site, their conversation is still there. A button at the top of the chat starts a new one. With Remember returning visitors on, the conversation is also there on their next visit, for up to 30 days.

The widget loads the chat only once your page has loaded, so it doesn't hold your page up. While the visitor's tab is open, it keeps a small note in that tab (session storage, under chatfrom: and your chatbot's id) of how the bubble looks and whether they closed the chat, so the bubble appears at once on your next page and a chat set to open doesn't pop up again. The note says nothing about the visitor and goes when the tab closes.

9. Add chat apps

Your customers don't only reach you through your website. Under Channels you can put the same chatbot in the apps where they already write to you. It answers with the same knowledge and tools, and every conversation ends up in the same place. The Channels guide explains how this works, and each app has its own step-by-step guide:

WhatsApp: on your business's own number.
Telegram: a bot people can message, on their own or in a group.
Slack: an app in your workspace, for direct messages and threads.
Discord: a bot in your community's server, and in direct messages.
Email: forward your support address to it, and it replies in the same email thread.
Crisp: it answers in the Crisp chat you already have, and hands over to your team when needed.

When Visitors can attach files is on under Deploy, the chatbot also reads a file or a photo sent to it in a chat with one person on WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord or Crisp. In a group it never reads files. In every chat app, the first answer of each conversation starts with “You're chatting with an AI assistant”, unless you turned that off.

Sometimes the chatbot needs to know who it is talking to, for example to look up a customer's own orders. Signed-in users explains how: your website tells the chatbot who is signed in, and in a chat app, a customer links their account once.

10. Watch it and improve it

Once your chatbot is live, the best way to make it better is to read what people ask it.

Conversations shows every conversation, from every channel. You can filter for the ones it couldn't answer, the answers people rated badly, and the ones passed to your team. Ratings are taken only from the chat itself and are limited per visitor, so nobody can flood them. When you find a weak answer, press Fix this, write the answer you wanted, and the chatbot uses it from then on.
Analytics covers the last 7, 30 or 90 days: conversations each day with the part left unanswered, what they cost, and how people rated the answers. When your answers are traced with Langfuse, it also shows answers each day, how long they took, and any errors from the model.
Evaluate is for measuring instead of guessing. You write a set of questions, each with what a good answer does, and ChatFrom asks your chatbot all of them. Choose Answers, and a judge model scores each answer from 0 to 10 with a reason. The judge always comes from another AI company than your chatbot's model, so no model marks its own answers, and the run says which one graded it. Or choose Retrieval, to score how well it found and used your knowledge. If some questions could not be scored, the run says how many and leaves them out of the score. The questions are made up, so during a run the chatbot uses none of your tools: nothing is booked or sent for real. Run it again after a change to see whether it helped. These runs are paid with your own OpenRouter key, not from your plan's credits. You add the key on the Evaluate page or under Settings, and it works for all your chatbots.
Settings, Observability is optional, for anyone who uses Langfuse. Paste your Langfuse project's address and its two keys, and every answer is traced there: the question, the passages it read, the model call and its cost.

The Overview page brings it all together: a checklist of these steps that ticks itself off as you go, your numbers for the week, and anything that needs your attention.

Your customers' data, and your account

How long conversations are kept: under Settings, Privacy, keep them until you delete them, or for 30 days, 90 days or 1 year after the last message. On the Hobby plan they are kept 14 days after the last message, whatever you choose, and your choice applies once you upgrade. Every night, older ones are deleted with their messages and files, what the chatbot remembers about people and has not updated since, and callback requests for calls before then.
When someone asks for their data, or for it to be deleted, search Conversations by the email they gave or their visitor id. Under a conversation you can download or delete it, or Everything about them: every conversation with the same visitor id (or the same private chat in a chat app), what the chatbot remembers about them and their callback requests. A typed email proves nothing about who someone is, so it only finds conversations and never joins them together. A group chat has no single person, so only the conversation itself can be deleted. In email, each person who writes in a thread has a conversation of their own that records who they are, so what the chatbot remembers about them goes with it, and their other email conversations too when their mail provider vouched for the address. A conversation from before senders were recorded doesn't say who wrote it; delete those notes under Tools, in What it remembers.
Account, in the sidebar: download everything your account holds as one JSON file, or delete the account. Deleting ends any subscription and removes every chatbot with its sources and conversations, and your sign-in. You confirm it by typing your email, and it can't be undone. If your subscription can't be cancelled at that moment, nothing is deleted and you are told so, so you are never charged for an account that is gone.

If you get stuck, write to us.