Ever since the launch of ChatGPT, our team at Poll the People has fallen in love with it and has been using this ChatGPT chatbot for all forms of use cases like blogging, coding, marketing messages, etc that have greatly enhanced our productivity.
But there is one limitation of ChatGPT: It only knows about the general Internet, and that too up to around July 2021.
And then someone suggested: “Hey, can we teach ChatGPT about our website content and our own data so that we can create blog posts based on the expert content we already have on our website?”
Hey, can we teach ChatGPT about our website content?
That then led to an engineering brainstorm and lo, and behold: We had a working prototype!
And the best part: We insisted that if it is available to our company, Poll the People, it should be available to everyone!
And that is how CustomGPT was born!
What is CustomGPT?
CustomGPT lets you build your own ChatBOT – with your data. You get your own customized ChatGPT powered chatbot that you can use to quickly get responses based on your content — without hallucinating — to answer customer service questions, talk to your documents or even let customers ask natural questions. No more typing keywords in search boxes!
It does this by ingesting your website content (or helpdesk knowledgebase or your documents!) and then uses OpenAI’s powerful language models (LLMs) to build your very own Custom ChatBOT.
Then when you or your customer asks a question, you will get a ChatGPT responses based on your business content or documents.
Why Is CustomGPT Needed Anyway?
Because ChatGPT is trained only on the general Internet until 2021. It does not know anything about what makes your business unique. Or the blog post you posted yesterday. Or the helpdesk article you just released. Or your internal documents you have in your folders.
For example: At Poll the People, we are a market research platform powered by AI. Our website is full of expert knowledge about how AI adds value to market research.
But ChatGPT does not know any of that.
But now that CustomGPT has been trained with our entire website (it took about 20 mins!), we can now ask CustomGPT questions related to our website, like “write an overview in 100 words on how to do brand name testing with poll the people” or “A French customer is asking about our pricing. Please answer in French” (Hint: Notice that ChatGPT understands 92 different languages)
That’s just one of 100+ use cases for CustomGPT in our business. You can see live use cases of this technology on the Poll the People website (Notice the CustomGPT widgets at the end of the article, the livechat in the bottom right, etc)
Live Demo
Want to see this in action? Try the live demo below — this chatbot has learnt all the content on our website, helpdesk, Youtube channel and even some documents.
What Can You Do With It?
Just imagine what you could do with ChatGPT if it knew about your content.
Off the top of our minds:
1. Quickly write blog post content based on your existing website content and brand voice.
2. Answer customer service questions quickly and accurately.
3. Let potential customers ask questions in natural language. No more typing keywords in search boxes!
4. Integrate CustomGPT into your website, helpdesk, apps and more.
5. Research tons of PDF documents and get ChatGPT content based on them (See this example)
6. Imagine you are a law firm or insurance company. Load in your case documents and then get quick answers based on all the case data. No more wasting hours opening PDFs one-by-one.
7. Plus 100+ more use cases.
If you’ve used ChatGPT before (and who has not?), then just think of this as “ChatGPT + Your Content”
How CustomGPT Works?
Short story: CustomGPT ingests your website content and then uses advanced large language models (LLMs) to build you your ChatGPT-style chatbot. You then ask it questions and give it commands. No more typing keywords in search boxes!
Setting It Up
The setup is super easy and takes about 2-minutes. All you do is supply CustomGPT your sitemap and it ingests the content based on that. (Update: March 16th 2023: We now support multiple ingestion methods – you can even Upload your documents)
Anyone who has worked with tools like Semrush, ahrefs or Google Search Console will be familiar with this process with sitemaps. If you need to build your own sitemap and need help, Fiverr is your friend.
Training With OpenAI
Once we get rolling on your sitemap or documents, we crawl your content and then use OpenAI’s powerful language models (called LLMs) to build a chatbot with that content. Within a few minutes, your chatbot is up and running.
You get always-updated access to the latest models from OpenAI. As they innovate, so does your CustomGPT bot. And all this in a secure cloud-hosted no-code subscription platform.
And as you add or refresh content on your website, your CustomGPT bot is automatically updated.
Chat Bot Ready
Which then leads to: Your very own ChatGPT-style chatbot. Try it out immediately by asking questions that only someone who has learnt your entire content will know. Like “What does this business do?” or “What is the pricing?”
See this Live Demo of a CustomGPT chatbot we built in about 20 mins. We fed it the sitemap of our website and we were asking questions few minutes later.
Best part: This chatbot now has the consolidated view of ALL our multi-source public-facing business documents and content. It is the “source of truth” available via natural language.
How Is This Different From ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is trained only on the general Internet until 2021 (as of this writing). CustomGPT builds you your chatbot based on *your specific content* (like your website or helpdesk content and your company documents). Just imagine what you can do with that now. Also, dont worry, in the backend, we are using the ChatGPT API so that we get all the power of the latest ChatGPT models.
CustomGPT now becomes your super-trained blog post writer. Or customer service agent. Or pre-sales assistant. Or research analyst.
What Will You Do With Your Own CustomGPT ChatBOT?
We hope you love this as much as we do. And we hope this can help bring generative AI trained with your content into your lives and business. Got questions? Check out the FAQ.
Better yet, give it a try! We’ve truly priced this so that anyone can build their very own CustomGPT chatbot.
22 Comments
Does it have to be a website?
Can I just enter the tonnes of notes (in digital form like notepad)?
Yes you can — as long as you can build a sitemap with links to your notes (in HTML format). You can probably have someone on Fiverr build this sitemap for you.
The process is not available in this step-by-step guide: https://customgpt.ai/personal-chatbot
This is now live.
Do you use finetune the DaVinci model or do you embed the HTML pages and use the relevant data through vector search in the prompt?
The latter.
Hello,
I love the concept and your platform!
How can I monetize my chatbot?
Is there a future plan to add a subscription feature for me to sell my chatbot services to my audience/customer?
Any suggestion is appreciated.
Thanks for the kind words. Good idea!
You can now embed the chatbot into your website and monetize it (using usual monetization channels). You could also build chatbot for your customers. See this example: https://www.indoorplantschannel.com/?s=vine+plants
Will the data it reads become a public knowledge?
Sorry – I did not understand. Currently, the data that the bot ingests is already public.
If you are asking if we store the ingested data: No: We don’t store anything on our systems.
And the CustomBOT bot access is CONTROLLED by the creator (it is PRIVATE by default). So someone can build a bot and use it only from the dashboard (for example: A lawyer working on a case)
UPDATE (March 20th 2023) : We just added the ability to “Upload” private data. The data is processed and the files are immediately deleted. And you get to control who can query the bot.
If GPT is used to query your personal data, then even if you delete it off your server, it still exists within open AI learning models, correct?
That is incorrect. We use the ChatGPT-4 API which OpenAI does NOT use for its training. So no part of your data is used by OpenAI for its learning. OpenAI has clarified this: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/01/addressing-criticism-openai-will-no-longer-use-customer-data-to-train-its-models-by-default/
I have a question regarding customGPT trained on my custom data. Is my new customGPT bot somehow prioritizing my data over general data and how exactly that works. Thank you.
Yes – exactly. We use embeddings and completions and prioritize your (relevant) data over general data in completion prompt.
Update: You can now control this. By default, it now uses only your data.
Can PDF be uploaded as part of my content?
That feature is coming in the next few days. First, we will ingest PDFs (and 55+ formats) when present in Sitemap. In a few days after that, we will have a “Upload” form in the dashboard.
Update (March 20th 2023) : This is now live. You can “Upload” PDFs and 55+ other formats (like TXT, MP3, DOC, PPT, XLS, etc)
Two Qs:
1a) I have a lot of video and audio content (e.g., short-form Loom videos for internal SOPs; long-form webinar presentations hosted on YouTube, Vimeo; podcasts). Will CustomGPT be able to ingest video and/or audio formats?
1b) If not, would the workaround be to use a video-to-text or audio-to-text tool to convert content to text?
2) Any plans to integrate with Notion? Or, alternatively, is it possible to integrate a shared/public Notion page into a CustomGPT sitemap?
> 1a) I have a lot of video and audio content (e.g., short-form Loom videos for internal SOPs; long-form webinar presentations hosted on YouTube, Vimeo; podcasts). Will CustomGPT be able to ingest video and/or audio formats?
If your sitemap has audio files (MP3, WAV, etc) — it will automatically transcribe them using OpenAI whisper and index the text from that. We just added that functionality yesterday.
The video captions we are looking into right now. Most likely will start with Youtube.
> 1b) If not, would the workaround be to use a video-to-text or audio-to-text tool to convert content to text?
This will work like a charm. If you have text files in your sitemap, those are easily ingested and indexed.
> 2) Any plans to integrate with Notion? Or, alternatively, is it possible to integrate a shared/public Notion page into a CustomGPT sitemap?
Yes – you can include ANY html page in your sitemap and it will be indexed. In fact, we just added support for 55+ document formats, so you could even have a ZIP file in your sitemap and the text from it will be indexed.