Our charitable UK based organisation want to use “nice AI tech” on our website to help disadvantaged householders who are in energy poverty. I have little tech knowledge, but I want to design a “friendly bot” to ask a few simple questions which would enable the bot to identify and reference current sources of energy advice, guidance and support. Would appreciate any help and support.
Hi Mark,
GPT may not be best tool for what you have in mind, this is because it is very broad and deep and so it is a bit difficult to keep it focused on very specific topics such as energy efficiency measures for disadvantaged households, appropriate government subsidies and the like.
It may provide clear concise answers in some cases and in other cases it could very well wander produce non-sensible results.
GPT would be a good tool for an energy engineer who is looking for technical solutions but it likely would not work well for a wide population of people with a mixed level of technical knowledge. To make it behave for this group would be a lot of work.
Fortunately, there are other chatbot engines that are used regularly for the type of application you are describing and they are not too difficult to set up. If you have a company or person maintaining your website now they may already know how to do this. Two chat bot engines that people use commonly are: Dialogflow and Microsoft Bot Framework, there are many others as well. You might consider starting with this approach.
Regards,
Barry
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Hi Mark, welcome to the community!
You have an interesting use case in mind. I’m happy to jump on a call and think this through. Feel free to just book a slot in my calendar: Calendly - Tobias Kemkes
Welcome to the OpenAI community @mark.fenty
My recommendation is to use run semantic search using embeddings to retrieve the information from your own documents that the user is asking for and then supplying it to the chat completion endpoint as context along with the user query to generate a reply to the question.
Sorry for delayed reply.
I thank you for your kind response to my request.
I have developed a test bot (not yet live on my soon to be developed website) and trained using a mixture of scraped websites which specialise in giving free energy advice and some PDF documents.
So far I am impresses with the performance and relative accuracy, so I know as it currently stands it offers some great benefits to people living in energy poverty.
I am however beginning to realise the importance of quality prompts and I am hoping soon to look at audio and translation add ins so that I can offer the bot to other like minded organisations.
Hi Mark,
It is a certainly a worthwhile endeavor you have embarked upon with your project.
For some years I have been volunteering at an energy efficiency nonprofit in the states called NEEP or Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships.
Most of NEEP’s work is dedicated to helping communities who then help individual people and businesses. (There are many small organizations at the community level across the country.)
Over the years NEEP has published many good papers and pdf documents. (Cold climate air source heat pumps has been a major focus in the past 5 years and before that energy efficient appliance standards and LED lighting conversion).
You are more than welcome to download and use any NEEP documents for non-profit purposes like the one that you describe. (Though some of the terms might need to be adjusted for use in the UK:-)
In addition to NEEP I might also recommend these similar government or nonprofit organizations serving energy efficiency needs, they all have high quality, free data sources:
“Maine State - Efficiency Maine”
“New York State - NYSERDA”
“US Department of Energy - NREL”
“US Department of Energy - Berkeley Flex Lab”
Best,
Barry
Barry that is so kind of you to reply and I thank you for your offer of help.
This is a link to my very first attempt Barry.
I have not yet deployed on my new website I have just purchased EnergyAssistant.Ai as there is much to do with testing etc.
I am trying to apply for a small grant so that I can get some technical help.
Please feel free to have a look Barry.
Technically I feel the idea of using AI technologies to develop a AI web chat bot is to develop a funnel to sell my AI Domestic Energy bot for a small monthly fee especially if I can get it to speak and offer various languages to help disadvantaged and disabled groups who are in energy poverty.
For a small monthly fee I could deploy and customise a web bot for use on their website with customised regional information.
Additional income would help our organisation to become more financially independent.
Please keep in touch Barry
Kindest Regards
Mark Fenty
Chief Executive Officer
Positive Activities Developments CIC
Website: www.PAD-CIC.org
Mobile: 07730 014961
NEA Level 3 Energy Awareness Advisor
Positive Activities Developments CIC No. 13168668 is a wholly owned subsidiary company of Positive Activities Charity No 1139403
As I can understand that you are interested in implementing a chatbot on your website. Is that correct? YourGPT AI Chatbot Can Help with that, I am also using it on my website.
Yes trying to develop an ORIMON web bot. Just a little confused as AI is moving so quickly.
If my bot can be trained well, then our not for profit organisation sees a great opportunity to personalise and sell the Energy Advice web bot to other UK organisations.