Enable AI Helper

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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

:discourse: Hosted by us? Currently, this module is available for all hosted by Discourse customers on any plan. :tada:

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. :discourse:

:information_source: 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:

Configuration

  1. Go to Admin → Settings → Discourse AI

  2. Make sure the discourse ai enabled setting is checked

    Screenshot 2023-11-21 at 10.22.29 PM
    Screenshot 2023-11-21 at 10.22.29 PM2224×410 33.8 KB

  3. Filter the settings by ai helper

  4. To activate the AI Helper feature, make sure the composer ai helper enabled setting is checked.

  5. You can limit the usage of the Composer AI Helper with the ai helper allowed groups setting.

  6. 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 :sparkles: 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 :smiley:

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Sorry I can’t give this topic a like at present. :slightly_frowning_face: Don’t take that to mean I don’t like what the AI is doing, I think that part is great.

The video started from a Draft and most users will start from New Topic so it was a bit confusing for me when I tried this on the OpenAI forum where this is active thinking it should work.

When I started with New Topic I had to enter the title, select a category, skipped adding tags and add two lines in the post before the magic AI options appeared.

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Then after adding more text the AI buttons appeared.

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I do find the post quite useful and you did a nice job, just needs some clarification for users not use to this technology.

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Side note:

In the early days of the Discourse AI there was the ability to have the AI generate a new title for the topic based on the existing text. I used this often as a category moderator when they titles ran long, think wrapped around when viewing in a list. Then the way to do this vanished; I may have missed how it was supposed to be done but now it is back with this.

As a category moderator one can not edit a post and the AI option is next to the title for changing.

Was looking for that in the announcement, might be worth a mention. :wink:

The following post contains some screenshots.

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Hey @EricGT so the video I put in a note that says that the content is already there. It was trying to make the demo video as short and succinct as possible.

I have the following documented for that reason!

1 Like