Turn Your Website Into an Intelligent Chatbot with Website Scraping

Updated on July 22, 2024

OpenAI’s ChatGPT revolutionized AI capabilities by effortlessly handling a diverse range of tasks such as writing code, blog posts, stories, essays, and poems. Its rapid adoption, reaching 100 million monthly users in just two months, marks it as the fastest-growing consumer application ever. Initially favored by individual users, enterprises soon recognized ChatGPT’s potential for business integration. However, a significant challenge emerged: businesses struggled to train their chatbots effectively on proprietary data, until recent advancements like website scraping addressed this hurdle.

But what is website scraping and how it works? Let’s see in the next section –

What is Website scraping ?

In the context of chatbots, website scraping refers to the technique of extracting data directly from websites to train and enhance the capabilities of chatbots. Chatbots trained on this scraped data are able to provide more contextual and accurate responses to user queries based on the information available on the website.

However, website scraping is not new. This technology has been around since 1993, when  Matthew Gray at MIT built the Wanderer. The Wanderer was based on Perl, and the primary use case was measuring the size of the web. Closely following suit were tools like Jumpstation and then, a decade later, Beautiful Soup.

Beautiful Soup was an HTML parser that used Python to parse the contents within the HTML containers. It saved the programmers hours of work, but it was also not the most efficient scraper out there. With the progress of time, there were visual web scrapers that allowed users to highlight important sections of the web and structure that into useful excel files.

How does Website Scraping Work?

Imagine a customer comes to your website, say Kommunicate

At the backend, we scrape the content of the HTML documents present inside the URL using Python. Once the scraping of the content inside the URL is done, this text is then broken into chunks.

The next step is to make embeddings for the extracted text. If you are new to  NLP, embeddings represent text as a dense vector of numbers to capture the meaning of words. They are used in search, clustering, anomaly detection and classification.

In the final step, there is a response for the question from the user, behind which there is an  LLM such as ChatGPT. 

All this works under the hood, and the user just has to enter the URL of the website that he would like to convert into a chatbot.

Kommunicate’s Website Scraper – Chat with any website in minutes!!

Watch the video tutorial here –

By now, you know a bit about scraping a website, how the technology grew, and what lies under the hood of a website scraper powered by an LLM.

Let us now see how to use this information to chat with any website, using Kommunicate’s Kompose bot builder.

Step 1: Go to the Bot Integrations Section

Login to your Kommunicate dashboard. If you haven’t signed up yet, you can sign up for free here.

Once you are in the dashboard, navigate to the Bot Integrations section.

After this, navigate to “Create a bot from Kompose” and select the Blank template.

Step 2: Set Up Bot Name and Language

In the ‘Bot profile’ page, set up your Bot by providing Bot Name & Language, then click ‘Save and proceed”.

Once saved, it will navigate to the next page ‘Human handoff’. Enable or disable the “Automatic bot to human handoff” setting, and click the ‘Finish bot setup’ button.

Step 3: Create a Welcome Message for Your Chatbot

After creating your first bot, you’ll be transferred to Kommunicate Flow Designer. By default, we’ve already prepared a basic conversation tree there to help you get going.

Click on the Bot response block to open its edit window. You can create it the way you want.

Step 4: Convert your Website Into a Chatbot

Now comes the fun part, where we actually convert our website into a chatbot. Click on Website Scraper and  input the URL you want to convert into a chatbot.

Finally, click on “Add” and then Boom, the scraper actually has now converted your entire website into a chatbot.

Step 5: Test Your Chatbot

The final step is to test your generative AI chatbot. Click on the “Test Chatbot” button on the right hand side. “Test Alex” in this case. 

Ask Alex any question you might have on the website. Congratulations, you have just converted your entire website into a chatbot.

Advantages and Applications of Web Chatbot trainer

The applications of website scraper include –

1. Data collection: LLMs can scrape the data from your website and present it really quickly to the target audience. This data can be in the form of product information, pricing data and customer reviews.
2. Sentiment analysis: LLMs can gauge the sentiments of the text present on the websites. For example, if there are a lot of negative customer reviews, the LLM can identify their specific pain points and suggest methods to address them.

There are various advantages of using a Web Chatbot trainer that can get trained just on the website URLs. Here are some of them –

Quick Deployment

Training a chatbot on website URLs allows for a quick and straightforward setup, significantly reducing the time required to get the chatbot operational.

Cost-effectiveness

Website scraping using LLMs is one of the most cost-effective ways to train the chatbot compared to manual scraping which also takes a lot of time.

Lower Maintenance

As the website content updates, the chatbot can automatically adapt, minimizing the need for constant re-training and upkeep.

Contextual Responses

With training directly from the website, the chatbot can deliver more accurate and contextually relevant answers, enhancing the overall user interaction.

Content Utilization

It makes full use of the comprehensive content already available on the site, maximizing the value derived from the existing website investment.

Parting Words

In conclusion, transforming your website into a powerful, interactive chatbot with a Web Bot Trainer is a game-changing strategy for modern businesses. This allows businesses to use their website content effectively and provide more contextual and personalized interactions to their customers.

Moreover, leveraging a Web Bot Trainer simplifies integration, reduces costs, and ensures the chatbot remains up-to-date with minimal effort. As a result, businesses can maintain a consistent brand voice and provide 24/7 support, meeting customer needs around the clock.

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