AI chatbot and assistant development
Custom assistants for your website, product or support desk — grounded in your own documentation, honest about their limits, and able to hand over to a human at the right moment.
What this involves
A chatbot is only as good as what it is allowed to say. The ones that damage a brand are those improvising answers about refund policies or medical dosages. Every assistant we build answers from a controlled body of your content, cites the source it used, and says plainly when it does not know.
The second thing that matters is the handover. A support assistant that cannot pass a frustrated customer to a person, carrying the full conversation with it, makes the experience worse than no assistant at all.
- Answers grounded in your documents, with citations
- A clear escalation path to a human, with context passed on
- Conversation history and analytics on what people actually ask
- Tone and boundaries you define, enforced in the system prompt
- Streaming responses, so it feels fast even when it is thinking
- Embeddable widget or a full in-product experience
Where the value actually comes from
The deflection rate matters less than the analytics. Within a fortnight of launch you will have a ranked list of what your customers genuinely ask, in their words, at volume. Most teams find two or three questions driving a third of their support load — usually fixable with a documentation change rather than any AI at all.
That feedback loop is worth more than the tickets deflected, and it is the part most chatbot vendors do not give you.
Design for the bad cases first
We design the failure states before the happy path: what the assistant says when it has no good answer, when the question is out of scope, when the user is angry, when the model is slow, and when a request is a prompt injection attempt. Those states are most of the real user experience.
What you receive
A deployed assistant on your infrastructure, an admin view for updating its knowledge without a developer, and a monthly report on what people asked and where it fell short.
Frequently asked questions
Is this like Intercom or a website chat plugin?
Those are good products and if an off-the-shelf tool solves your problem you should buy it, not build. Custom work is worth it when you need it to act on your own systems, follow policies a generic tool cannot express, or run somewhere your data is not allowed to leave.
How do you stop it inventing answers?
It only answers from retrieved passages of your content, and every claim carries a citation you can click. When retrieval returns nothing relevant, it is instructed to say so and offer a human. That combination removes the large majority of fabrication.
Can it speak other languages?
Yes. Modern models handle major languages well out of the box. What needs care is the retrieval side — your source content may only exist in one language, so we set up either translated indexes or cross-language retrieval depending on your volumes.
What ongoing cost should we expect?
Model usage for a typical support assistant runs a few cents per conversation, so a few hundred dollars a month at moderate volume. Hosting is usually under $50. We size this honestly during scoping so there are no surprise bills.
Tell us what you are building.
Send a short description of the problem and we will reply within one business day with an honest view of scope, cost and whether we are the right person for it.
Or email directly: contact@hire-ai-dev.com