Setting up a chatbot

Chatbots live under Websites. Press New Chatbot, then work through the three tabs — Settings, Tribes and Knowledge Sources.

A tribe is one location, branch or business unit inside your organisation — the word Gorilla Dash uses on every screen.

The settings that matter

Rules are the most underused setting. "Always mention our free design consultation" or "never quote a price, offer a callback instead" shapes every reply.

Putting it on your site

The settings screen gives you a snippet to paste into your website, and a shareable link — a public page that opens straight into the chatbot, handy for testing or for an email campaign.

Appearance

Set the widget position, whether it opens minimised or expanded, its colour and its header text. The chat window's own wording appears in your business's language — but the assistant replies in whatever language the visitor writes in.

When you choose Expanded, a Delay before opening field appears next to it. That is how many seconds the chat window waits after the page has loaded before it opens itself. Leave it at 0 and the window is already open when the visitor arrives; set it to something like 15 or 30 and they get a moment to read the page first. You can enter a whole number from 0 to 600 seconds.

Allowed domains

Your attached websites are always allowed. Add extra domains if the widget needs to run somewhere else — a landing page host, for instance. Listing a domain also covers its subdomains.

Testing it

The test console lets you talk to it as a visitor and choose which tribe to test as, including testing with no tribe so you can see how it asks.

Turning it off

Set the status to Disabled. Do not try to switch it off by unticking every tribe — the form will not let you save that, because a chatbot attached to no tribes would be invisible with no explanation.