This topic covers the configuration of AI Helper feature 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 Enterprise customers. Please contact us to have it added to your site.
To activate the AI Helper feature, make sure the composer ai helper enabled setting is checked.
Pick an LLM you would like to use in ai_helper_model setting.
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 (minimum 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 uncommon languages
We recommend enabling the features 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
Sorry I can’t give this topic a like at present. 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.
Then after adding more text the AI buttons appeared.
I do find the post quite useful and you did a nice job, just needs some clarification for users not use to this technology.
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.
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.
It seems like it’s showing as unused in the OpenAI dashboard. But could it be because the configuration wasn’t completed? How can I verify this on my local machine?
The AI helper in the composer encompasses three main features including suggestions, context_menu, and image_caption
The setting allows us to have granular control of the AI helper by being able to enable/disable those main features.
suggestions refers to the the suggestion buttons that appear in the composer next to the title/category/tags. Clicking the suggestion button can suggest topic titles, category, tags, etc.
context_menu refers the the menu that appears when you select a portion of text in the composer, i.e. the menu that pops up with the custom prompt/translate/proofread/etc
image_caption refers to the “Caption with AI” button that appears when you hover over an uploaded image in the composer preview. This allows you to generate a caption based on the contents of the image.
I think eventually we would like to move to a system to provide more granular control of features within AI Helper and in other AI features, something in the radar for the future
Hosted by us? Currently, this module is available for Enterprise customers. Please contact us to have it added to your site.
Self-hosted users can install the plugin anytime by following Install Plugins in Discourse - sysadmin - Discourse Meta
icon?
Don’t take that to mean I don’t like what the AI is doing, I think that part is great.
