The Assistant tab holds two settings: your own instructions for the assistant, and the time zone it lives in. Both can stay as they are.
These are its built-in rules; your instructions are added after them:
- It searches your site for every question.
- It answers only from what that search finds.
- It links every page, product and PDF page it uses. When an answer links none of them, Opensolr adds them at the end: the documents it read whole, otherwise up to 5 of the pages it found that the answer draws on, otherwise the best result. They show as small pills under the answer.
- It looks up the facts it must not guess, like the local time somewhere or today’s exchange rate.
- It answers every visitor in the visitor’s own language.
Optional, up to 4,000 characters. Your own words for the assistant, added after its built-in rules: its tone, what to recommend, what to avoid. For example:
Answer in two or three short sentences, then the links. When someone asks about delivery, also link the shipping page. Do not compare our products with other brands.
Line breaks are kept. Leave the field empty to use the built-in rules alone.
The assistant’s now. Its today, this week and the latest are counted in this time zone, and so are the dates in the answers of the commands, like the date of each result of /search.
The list shows every time zone with its offset from UTC, in offset order, such as (UTC-05:00) America/New York or (UTC+03:00) Europe/Bucharest. The offset is the one of today, so it follows summer time. Until you choose one, the chat uses the time zone PHP is set to on your server, or UTC when PHP has none.
The assistant sees the conversation, not only the last question: up to the last ten messages go with each new question, the commands themselves left out. So a follow-up like and the cheaper one? reaches the assistant together with the answer before it. Opensolr also keeps what the searches of the conversation found, so sort them by price or go back to the first list is answered from those results, with their real values, without a new search. New chat starts a conversation with no memory of the last one.
How many questions one conversation may have is set on Limits.
The hosted chat has the same two settings, on the Assistant tab of its Control Panel: Assistant: instructions and time zone.