How I Built Bill, the AI-Powered Chatbot That Reads Our Docs for Fun

A talk given by Todd Kerpelman from Plaid at the 2024 Austin API Summit in Austin, Texas.
Have you ever thought about building your own chatbot to help developers be more successful using your APIs? Well, we made one for Plaid’s documentation site, and in this talk, I’ll cover some of the things we learned!
This presentation will cover topics like:
- How does it work? What does it mean to “train” a bot on your docs?
- Setting appropriate expectations: Do you still need to write documentation? Do you still need a support team?
- The trade-offs around building your own vs. buying a 3rd party solution
- Some decisions around the underlying tech
- How to build a decent “conversational mode” so you can ask follow-up questions
- How you evaluate the quality of a chatbot, and some surprises we ecountered along the way
- What do you do when things go wrong?
- Security considerations
And much more! Actually, probably not that much more. That already sounds like a lot.
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