The Discourse AI settings page now has a “Features” page, where admins can quickly view all AI features available and ready to be customized to better fit their communities.
Since the early days of Discourse AI, one recurrent request from our users has been a way to customize the prompts that power features like Topic Summarization or Proofreading. We wanted to do it, but it had to be done in a way that was sustainable and wouldn’t result in broken features.
Another issue was that as our feature set grew so did the number of site settings for the AI plugin, and it was hard to track which settings affected which features.
Enter the Features page
The new Features page of the AI plugin enables admins to:
-
Set a default LLM for all Discourse AI features
-
Quickly see which features are enabled or disabled
-
Review at-a-glance which Personas and LLMs power each individual feature
-
Edit the settings related to each feature via the Edit page
We are using a new design approach for this page to ease the cognitive load for admins while being true to our roots of making Discourse completely customizable. Let us know if this approach is working for you.
Personas as the AI building block
With this update, we introduced a big change to support extensive customizations for prompts as well as better LLM compatibility for all our features. Every feature in Discourse AI is now backed by a Persona.
We first introduced Personas as a way to have multiple conversational AI Bots. Over time, we made many upgrades to our Persona system, including support for Structured Outputs and example conversation turns. Hence, Personas in Discourse are now a full-fledged agent platform that underpins all our features.
This means that we can allow prompts to be customized without worrying much about parsing the LLM output, thanks to the deterministic nature of structured outputs. We can now also support advanced use cases like allowing tool calls and RAG uploads in our AI Helper Explain feature, and much more.
Alongside this incredible amount of customization, we also ship default Personas for all built-in features. This is very helpful for casual users and admins, who now can enable many useful AI features using only a few clicks.