Founder, DFYe
Lawrence Dauchy
Lawrence builds DFYe, a customer support plugin that answers from a site's own pages and cites the page it answered from. He writes about retrieval, refusal and why most chat plugins look the same.
Articles by Lawrence Dauchy (19)
Can a chatbot really replace live agents? Mostly no
A chatbot takes the questions that repeat and whose answers are already written down. That is most of the volume and almost none of the difficulty, and the difference is the whole argument.
We dropped GSAP and got 31kB back for thirty lines of code
GSAP plus SplitText is 31kB gzipped. The one thing we used it for was a staggered word reveal on a headline, which turns out to be about thirty lines of DOM and one CSS transition.
AI chatbot for website: what it is and how to pick one
An AI chatbot reads your own pages and answers questions from them. What that really means, the four kinds on the market, what each costs, and when you should not install one.
Best AI chatbot for a website: how to actually choose one
Every product in this category claims accuracy, speed and easy setup, so those words separate nothing. Here is what does, measured against the install and review data rather than the pricing pages.
How can AI help my website? Six real jobs and three it cannot do
The useful version of this question is not what AI can do in general, but which jobs on your site it can take today and which ones it will quietly get wrong.
826,000 WordPress sites have a chat widget. Almost none of it is AI.
I pulled every chat and AI plugin on WordPress.org with more than a thousand installs. 38 of them matter, they cover 826,000 sites, and the shape of that number is not what the marketing suggests.
How to create an AI chatbot for your website: the real steps
Installing takes five minutes and every guide stops there. The work is what comes after: what it reads, what it must not, and what it does when it does not know.
AI widget for website: making one that fits your site
A chat widget is the only plugin whose output every visitor sees on every page, and the category treats it as plumbing. What to demand from one, and what it costs your page.
How to troubleshoot a website: reproduce, isolate, change one thing
The instinct is to disable plugins until something changes. It works often enough to become a habit and teaches you nothing when it does not. Here is the order that survives a hard case.
How much does an AI chatbot cost? The four pricing shapes
The number on the pricing page tells you about an average month. The shape behind it tells you about your worst one, and only one of those is worth comparing.
How to improve website performance: measure, then fix one thing
Most speed advice is a list of twelve things to try, which is what you write when you have not measured. Find the one request costing you the time, and change that.
AI bot that knows my inventory: what actually has to connect
Knowing your stock is not one feature, it is four levels, and which one you need depends entirely on how fast your numbers move. Getting this wrong makes a bot confidently wrong about the thing customers care most about.
Connect ChatGPT to a website: what actually has to move
Connecting a model to your site is four small pieces of plumbing, and one of them is a security decision people get wrong on the first attempt. Here is what moves, and what it costs.
What happens when an AI chatbot cannot answer a question?
Three things can happen and only one of them is acceptable. This is the behaviour worth testing before you buy anything, and almost nobody tests it.
How do I train an AI chatbot on my own data? You mostly don't
Training teaches a model how to sound. Indexing teaches it what is true about your business. Almost everyone asking the first question actually wants the second.
AI agent for an ecommerce website: what makes it an agent
A chatbot answers. An agent does things. The difference is a boundary between reading your shop and writing to it, and where you draw that line is the whole decision.
How to use AI for website customer support: what to automate first
Start with the four questions that arrive every week and whose answers are already written down. The order you automate in decides whether anybody trusts the result.
Are AI chatbots GDPR compliant? The four decisions that decide it
GDPR never mentions chatbots. It governs personal data, and a visitor's question is personal data. Compliance turns on four decisions you make at install time, not on a badge on a pricing page.
How to improve ecommerce conversion rate without fooling yourself
Most conversion advice is untestable at your traffic level. Here is what to change, how to tell whether it worked, and how long you have to wait before the number means anything.
Put a real answer on every page.
Ask this site's own widget a question and watch it cite the page, or refuse. It is the same plugin, running on the same content you are reading.