Attendant - Free AI Site Search & Chatbot

Yes, with Google Gemini. Sign in to aistudio.google.com with any Google account and create a free key in two clicks. No credit card is ever asked. Paste the key into the setup wizard and everything runs at no cost, both the chat and the learning of your content. Because there is no payment method on the account, you can never be charged by accident. On a very busy day the chat simply pauses until the free daily allowance resets.

No. OpenAI is an optional alternative. If you use it, a typical conversation costs well under one cent, so around $5 to $10 per month for 1,000 conversations, billed by OpenAI to your account.

Google's free plan allows hundreds of chat messages per day, plenty for a typical site. Teaching the chatbot your content is also free, so a large site simply takes a little longer to index the first time.

Only the user's chat message and relevant content excerpts (for Q&A mode) are sent to OpenAI. Your full database is never sent. API keys are encrypted before storage and never leave your server.

No. The chat widget is tiny and loads in the background without holding up your pages. All AI work happens only when a visitor actually sends a message, never while your pages load.

Yes. The plugin automatically finds your custom fields from ACF, MetaBox, and WooCommerce product attributes. Nothing to configure.

No. The conversation is kept in the visitor's own browser (localStorage) so it survives page changes and refreshes. It is not stored on your server or in your database. The visitor can clear it with the "New chat" button at any time.

Yes, but it is off by default. When you enable lead capture in Settings and a visitor agrees to be contacted, the assistant collects the email they provide (and optionally a phone number and preferred time) and emails the request to the address you configure. It is rate-limited to one request per conversation and a daily maximum, and nothing is stored in a database. See the Privacy section for details.

Yes. Every accepted callback request also fires a WordPress action, attendant_lead_captured, with the visitor's validated email and the optional details (name, phone, preferred time, topic). Any developer or newsletter plugin can hook it: add_action( 'attendant_lead_captured', function ( $email, $lead ) { my_newsletter_subscribe( $email, $lead['name'] ); }, 10, 2 ); The hook fires only after validation and rate-limit checks pass, so you only ever receive real, consented requests.

Yes, if you connect Slack. The chat only offers the "talk to a person" button when the AI actually falls short, so visitors are not pushed at your team for questions the bot can answer. When someone takes it, the conversation becomes one thread in your Slack channel, led by a short summary of what they were asking about. Whatever your team writes in that thread appears in the visitor's chat, and whatever they type next appears in the thread. It is off by default.

A Slack workspace, and a website Slack can reach. A setup wizard in the plugin walks you through it: it creates the Slack app for you with the right permissions already filled in, you paste two values back, and it creates the channel and puts you in it. It will not work on a local development site, because Slack has to be able to send replies to your site.

Yes. Each website needs its own Slack app, because a Slack app can only send replies to one address and that address is your site. The setup wizard handles this for you: run it on each site and it creates an app pointed at that site, named after it, so they are easy to tell apart. All of them install into the same Slack workspace, and each site gets its own channel. Give each channel a different name, since Slack channel names have to be unique.

Yes, optionally. File logging is off by default. When enabled, each exchange is written to a dated file in a protected folder in your uploads directory, kept for 30 days, and downloadable only by an administrator. IP addresses are never stored and session identifiers are one-way hashed. See the Privacy section.