This topic covers the configuration of AI Helper module of the Discourse AI plugin.
Overview
AI Helper assists you in your community journey whether you are creating topics/posts or reading along. It’s there to make your thinking even better, so you can save time or use it wisely.
When creating topics/posts, the AI Helper is a writing assistant. It can help brainstorm topic titles, categories, and tags. While writing, you can select text anywhere and ask the AI Helper to proofread, generate a markdown table, or translate into English. The best part is that you can ask the AI Helper anything through custom prompts! Need the text to be translated into a language of your choosing? Or need to make the tone sound more professional? Input your custom prompt and watch your text transform.
While reading topics, AI Helper is designed to be your smart assistant. Seeing text in a foreign language? you can select words and ask AI Helper to translate them into English. Need help understanding what is meant by a specific paragraph or word? you can get AI Helper to explain their meaning in the context of the topic and post.
The following is an example of AI Helper features within Composer, note: there was already written content.
The following is an example of AI Helper’s “Explain” feature while reading a topic.
Features
-
Within Composer
- Only for logged-in users, can be used when creating a new topic or replying
- Generate topic titles/tags/categories, based on text context content within Composer
- Proofread selected text
- Translate selected text to English
- Generate a Markdown table from selected text
- Custom prompts
- View changes, see the history of what what has changed
- Revert changes, undo AI helper’s changes
- Confirm changes, accepting AI Helper’s changes
-
While reading topics/posts
- Only for logged-in users
- Translate selected text to English
- Explain selected text
Availability
Hosted by us? Currently, this module is available for all hosted by Discourse customers on any plan.
It comes pre-installed on most plans, and if you’re an Enterprise customer you can contact us to have it added to your site on request.
Self-hosted users can install the plugin anytime by following Install Plugins in Discourse - sysadmin - Discourse Meta
Enabling AI Helper
Prerequisites
Must configure from at least one of the options below:
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Azure OpenAI
- AWS Bedrock with Anthropic access
Configuration
-
Go to Admin → Settings → Discourse AI
-
Make sure the
discourse ai enabled
setting is checked -
Filter the settings by
ai helper
-
To activate the AI Helper feature, make sure the
composer ai helper enabled
setting is checked. -
You can limit the usage of the Composer AI Helper with the
ai helper allowed groups
setting. -
You can limit the usage of the Post AI Helper feature with the
post ai helper allowed groups
setting.
Technical FAQ
- How does AI Helper work within Composer? Why am I not seeing the
icon?
- AI Helper uses text content (min 10 words) within Composer and passes that context to a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate topic titles/tags/categories/etc
- How does the “Explain” feature work?
- It uses the context of the topic title, post, and the words highlighted and passes that context to an LLM which helps explain the selected text
- What are some custom prompts that I can use?
- Custom prompts can vary greatly as there are a vast number of possibilities, some examples can include “make it sound more professional” or “translate to Bengali”
Caveats
- AI helper does not always provide 100% accurate results, especially when translating to languages that are uncommon
- We recommend enabling the bot for specific user groups to help control costs, as 3rd party providers charge on a per-usage basis
P.S: the Overview was written with the help of AI Helper