How to Build Your Own Custom ChatGPT Bot

As AI has gained significant traction in the last few months since the unveiling of ChatGPT, it has become critical to provide customised solutions to deliver stellar customer service or to create very specific ways of engaging with customers. ChatGPT is a chatbot with a specific knowledge base, but it can also be a tool to inspire us to create our own. If you want to know how to build a chatbot, here is a framework to provide a customised experience.

What Are You Using It for?

Before we dive into the technical components, you need to ask yourself what it will be used for. When creating a custom chatbot for B2B customers, the answer might be pretty obvious, but you should still identify your target audience to determine the knowledge you want to create.

If a customer is asking very technical questions about your business when they engage with your chatbot, you will need to determine the knowledge base and understand the context the bot will be used to guide the development process.

Picking the Language Model

ChatGPT creators OpenAI provide a number of language models. The most popular language models are GPT-3 and GPT-4, with GPT-4 being the latest model unveiled on March 14, 2023. GPT-4 is essentially an upgraded version of GPT-3, with a larger database, improved factual performance, and different image and language capabilities like different tones, voices, and styles. However, choosing a more sophisticated language model with more advanced features requires greater expenses and resources.

Choosing the right language model will depend on your budget and goals, and if the language model can perform according to your specific use case. You can test this by sending sample prompts to each model to see how they perform. While there is a number to choose from, the language model text-davinci-002 is the most capable, meaning it is the most expensive, and at the other end of the spectrum, the text-ada-002 model is the least expensive, but is also the least capable.

Deciding how sophisticated you require your language to be is as much about understanding your audience as your budget, and once you have decided, you can access the language model via a PHP library, which you can install onto your website.

Inputting Custom Knowledge

Determining the custom knowledge base is firstly about understanding your chatbot's purpose and domain. You need to provide a data set containing relevant information with the data set being in a structured data storage format, such as JSON or CSV, and then fine-tune this model using a data set of text relevant to the chatbot’s purpose. This will help the model learn and understand the context it is being used.

Fine-tuning your custom knowledge base will require using the OpenAI fine-tuning API (Application Programming Interface), but at the time of writing it is not possible to fine-tune GPT-4 via the OpenAI API, but you can follow this structure to fine-tune your model:

• Preparing your data set with examples of user input and relevant responses.
• Convert the data set to the format required by the OpenAI API, which requires data sets to be as a list of dictionaries, with each dictionary containing either a Role (which would be the system or user) and the Content, which would be the text.
• Upload the data set to OpenAI with the OpenAI API by creating a data set and then uploading it with the data sets.create endpoint.
• Fine-tuning the model by specifying the base model you want to change the data set you've uploaded to the system and other parameters.
• Monitoring the fine-tuning process so you can track the process by acquiring the job status via the fine-tunes.retrieve endpoint.
• Testing the model using the OpenAI API via the fine_tuning_status dictionary under model.

Create an API for User Interaction

For users to interact with your chatbot, you will need to create an API to handle any requests. There are a number of ways to build APIs depending on the programming language you are comfortable with.

Why You Should Build Your Own Custom ChatGPT Bot

There are fantastic reasons to build a chatbot. Depending on your business goals, you can use a chatbot to save operating costs or help you focus your efforts to build a better business:

Can Be Cheaper

Businesses that design their own chatbot can save money, but this will depend on the knowledge you have in-house and if you have the skills to create conversation flows that feel natural.

Can Help Grow In-House Skills

If you create the product in-house it will allow your staff to develop this skill set, which can be a great asset for your organisation.

Greater Control Over the Output

Fine-tuning how the chatbot interacts with customers can help to create more natural interactions, resulting in a better user experience. As businesses look for an omnichannel experience, they have to work doubly hard on making chatbots sound more human.

Improves Customer Engagement

Chatbots can provide customers with a personalised and engaging experience that can improve customer satisfaction and acquisition.

Data Collection Opportunities

Chatbots can collect information about customer preferences and behaviour, which can then inform the products, services, and the chatbot itself.

Increased Efficiency

Chatbots have been proven time and time again to accurately respond to customer queries in real-time, and as it is available 24/7, it can deliver customer support whenever it is needed.

Scalability

Chatbots can handle a high volume of customer queries at the same time, allowing human customer service agents to focus their efforts where it is needed while also saving money on the business.

Businesses that are looking to improve their relationship with their customers can benefit from incorporating a chatbot into their customer service arsenal. Building a custom chatbot can require coding experience, but at Click4Assistance we are aware that not everybody has the ability to do this in-house. We provide a custom chatbot builder that makes it easy to create solutions that suit your business. As tools like ChatGPT are helping to make everyone's lives easier, you can use this as inspiration to make your business a far more personable one.