Admin Guide
For the person who sets up and runs an Ollabear bot — a store owner, support lead, or operator. No engineering required for anything except the optional REST API. Sign in at app.ollabear.com.
Core concepts
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Workspace | Your account. Everything below lives inside it, isolated from every other customer. |
| Bot | One assistant with its own persona, knowledge base, and widget key. You can run multiple bots. |
| Knowledge Base (KB) | The documents a bot answers from. Built from your website at onboarding; add more any time. |
| Persona | The bot’s voice + rules (tone, what it does and doesn’t do). |
| Widget | The chat bubble your visitors use, embedded with one <script> tag. |
Widget key (qk_…) | Public key in the embed snippet. Safe to expose; locked to your domain(s). |
Access token (pat_…) | Secret key for the REST API / automations. Treat like a password. |
How an answer is produced: visitor message → safety guardrails (PII + prompt-injection) → retrieve relevant KB passages → the AI answers in your persona, citing sources → if it isn’t confident, it follows your fallback/handoff rule.
Getting started (live in ~5 minutes)
- Sign up at app.ollabear.com (email/password or Sign in with Google).
- Paste your website URL. Ollabear crawls your site, builds a persona from your real content, and seeds the bot’s Knowledge Base.
- Answer the 3 questions (goal, how to hand off, how strict the bot should be). These tune behaviour without prompt-writing.
- Copy the embed snippet and paste it before
</body>:<script src="https://app.ollabear.com/widget.js" data-api-key="qk_YOUR_KEY" defer></script> - Test it on your live site — ask something your website answers; you should get a grounded reply with a source.
Shopify merchant? Skip the snippet — install the Ollabear app from the Shopify App Store. It provisions the bot, locks it to your store domain, and imports your catalog automatically.
Knowledge Base
Dashboard → Knowledge.
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Add a web page | Paste a URL → Ollabear fetches + indexes it. |
| Upload a file | PDF / text upload. |
| Paste text | For FAQs/policies not on your site. |
| Remove a source | Delete a document; the bot stops using it immediately. |
Each bot has its own KB — bot B never answers from bot A’s documents. The dashboard shows coverage (share of recent answers that cited a source); low coverage means your KB has gaps for what visitors actually ask. Best practice: put the answers to your top 10 support questions in the KB explicitly.
Bot Studio
Dashboard → AI / Bot settings. Edit by form or by chatting with the setup assistant.
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Persona | Tone + identity. Keep it short; the bot already knows your KB. |
| Reply in visitor’s language | Auto-detects + mirrors the visitor’s language. |
| Strictness | ai_enhanced (KB + general help), strict (only your site, else declines), never_guess (no match → apologise + capture email / hand off). |
| Confidence threshold | If the best KB match is too weak, the bot won’t guess. |
| Max bot replies | After N replies, hand off / capture email. |
| Fallback message | What the bot says when it can’t answer confidently. |
| Lead capture | When/which fields to ask for (e.g. email). |
| FAQs | Curated Q→A pairs the bot prioritises. |
Choosing strictness: e-commerce/regulated → strict or never_guess (never invent policy); general SMB → ai_enhanced (helpful on open questions). Preview changes before they reach visitors.
Inbox & human handoff
Dashboard → Inbox. See live and past conversations, search, filter. Take over a conversation: the AI pauses while you’re assigned; unassign or close and the AI resumes. Handoff triggers automatically on low confidence, never_guess mode, the max-bot-replies cap, or a visitor asking for a human.
Shopify
Install from the Shopify App Store → search Ollabear → Install. The app provisions your bot (no separate signup), locks the widget to your store domain, and imports your products + store policies so the bot can answer “do you have X?” and “what’s your return policy?”. It re-syncs on re-open/re-auth. Uninstalling stops the bot; Shopify’s GDPR shop-redaction soft-deletes your Ollabear data.
Auto-injecting the widget onto the storefront is on the roadmap; until it ships you may still paste the snippet. Catalog import + provisioning are live.
Speed & cost: the response cache (optional)
Ollabear can cache answers to repeated questions so the second visitor asking “do you ship to Canada?” gets an instant, zero-cost reply. Off by default — enable per workspace and watch the hit-rate. Safe: only near-identical questions hit, and the cache is wiped automatically whenever you change the KB, so you never serve a stale answer after updating content.
API & automations (optional, for developers)
Two ways to integrate:
- No-code via Activepieces — the official Ollabear piece connects your bot to 280+ apps (Slack, Gmail, Sheets, HubSpot, …): trigger flows on new conversations/messages, push replies, set status/tags.
- Direct REST API — for custom scripts.
Get a token in Settings → API Tokens → Create (or use the “Automation (Activepieces)” preset). The pat_… value is shown once. Full details: API Reference.
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer pat_live_…" \
https://app.ollabear.com/v1/integrations/conversations?status=open
Billing
Dashboard → Billing (powered by Dodo Payments). Free to start; upgrade to Starter / Pro / Scale (monthly or annual). Metered: monthly conversation volume (Free 100 / Starter 1k / Pro 10k / Scale 50k). Bots and domains are unlimited on every tier. Upgrade, downgrade, cancel, reactivate, and open the billing portal from this page.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Fix |
|---|---|
| Widget doesn’t appear | Snippet not before </body>, or wrong data-api-key. Re-copy from onboarding. |
| Blocked / no reply on your domain | Widget key locked to a different domain. Add your domain in Settings → API Keys. |
| Bot says “I don’t know” a lot | KB gaps — add the missing info; check coverage. |
| Bot won’t answer open questions | Strictness is strict/never_guess; switch to ai_enhanced for broader help. |
| API returns 401 | Bad/expired pat_…, or you used the public qk_ key for the REST API (use the PAT). |
| API returns 403 | Token lacks the scope for that action. |
Still stuck? app.ollabear.com → Help, or your support contact.