1.2 – Build and launch your first chatbot Lesson

Lesson Overview

This lesson covers everything you need to get started with Chatbase, a popular platform for building AI chatbots trained on your unique data. You’ll learn to create your first chatbot by making a free or paid Chatbase account and adding data that powers your bot’s responses. The lesson walks you through the main options for adding training data—including uploading documents, adding direct Q&A, connecting to Notion, and attempting to use your website’s public links.

Chatbots are only as helpful as the information you give them. That makes the setup phase crucial for any business, course creator, or support team looking to add a helpful assistant to their website. Real-world uses include building customer service bots using your product documentation, internal knowledge assistants trained on company manuals, or interactive tutors using transcripts from educational content.

This lesson builds the groundwork for everything else in the course. Later lessons will focus on customization and advanced settings, but you’ll need a working, data-trained chatbot to use those features effectively. By starting with the basics, you’re preparing to add powerful, automated tools that can help answer questions, guide website visitors, or even assist in teaching—all without manual reply.

Who This Is For

Anyone looking to add an AI chatbot to a website or digital product will benefit from this lesson. It’s especially useful for:

• Small business owners wanting to automate customer support using their own help docs
• Course creators aiming to offer AI-powered tutoring with custom data
• Marketers or webmasters experimenting with advanced content experiences
• Educators digitizing resources for student Q&A
• Teams evaluating chatbot platforms for company-wide knowledge sharing
• Anyone wanting to try chatbot building before investing in premium AI solutions

Where This Fits in a Workflow

Adding and training your AI chatbot is a first, necessary step in the full chatbot project lifecycle. Once you set up your chatbot with the right data sources, you’ll be able to test and refine its output, later embedding it on your public or internal website. For example, after this lesson, a tutor could upload lesson transcripts to power a course-specific chatbot. A business could upload product PDFs or scrape their support site to start an FAQ assistant.

When you finish this lesson, you’ll have a baseline bot ready for customization. The knowledge you set here is what future adjustments (like fine-tuning chat behavior or changing public/private status) will build on. Proper setup pays off later by making both the chatbot and your workflow more efficient.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Manually answering site visitor questions, fielding support emails, or updating static FAQ pages takes time and is often inconsistent. By training an AI chatbot with your key documents or web content, you automate reliable, up-to-date responses using a scalable tool. With Chatbase, onboarding is quick: uploading PDFs or entering Q&A instantly broadens your bot’s knowledge.

With free plans, you can test ideas safely before committing, but paid plans allow a vastly larger dataset—making your chatbot useful for more in-depth or high-traffic scenarios. For example, upgrading from a 400,000-character limit to over 11 million enables large company wikis, multi-course training content, or complete product guides to be included. This not only saves staff time but ensures site visitors receive accurate, immediate help, improving both satisfaction and retention.

Practice Exercise

Pick a realistic source of information that would be helpful to your intended chatbot users. For instance, use a set of product support documents, a course syllabus, or a batch of video transcripts.

1. Sign up for a free Chatbase account and create a new chatbot.
2. Upload at least one file (such as a PDF or text transcript), or test the “add website” feature using your organization’s main site.
3. When the bot is created, enter a relevant question and review the provided answer. Click to reveal the training source used.

Reflection: Did the chatbot respond accurately based on your uploaded data? How might results change if you use a paid plan and include more content?

Course Context Recap

This lesson marks the transition from exploring chatbot ideas to building your own data-powered assistant using Chatbase. Previous lessons introduced the platform; in this segment, you create, train, and test a working bot. The next lessons will build on this foundation, guiding you through settings adjustments, best practices for tuning bot behavior, and strategies for embedding your chatbot on your website. Continue with the course to unlock more advanced features and apply your chatbot in real-world scenarios.