We've talked to a lot of businesses, and one of the most common responses we hear is along the lines of "Chatbots are hard" or "We're not big enough for a chatbot".

They're delighted when they see how easy it is to make a chatbot, but we don't want to keep that knowledge just with the businesses we talk to. We want everyone to understand just how easy it is to build your own, so let's build one in 10 minutes.

That's right, in 10 minutes we'll have a working, friendly, and helpful chatbot to serve to our customers. For this exercise, we'll come up with a fictional business to use: Pizza Planet. The first thing we'll do is go set up a Sidekick AI account here. When you have a Sidekick account set up, you'll see this screen:

This will be your Sidekick dashboard; your window into how many customers are using your Sidekick at any given time. To get started on our Sidekick, we'll want to head over to the settings page and navigate to the Sidekick section
on the navbar on the left. You should be seeing a page like this:

The first thing we should set up is to give our Sidekick a name! We'll call ours Geoff, but feel free to call yours anything you want.

Next we'll head over to the knowledge base section and get to work. Here is where we'll start adding information about our company. For our fictional Pizza Planet, let's add some information about our hours, our policies, our location, and of course our menu.

After inputting the basic information, our knowledge base will look something like this:

Awesome! Now our chatbot knows about our business and can search through this knowledge base when a customer asks a question.

If our business ran on an internet-connected ordering system, we could automate the ordering process as well using Sidekick's Actions system!

We're adding more native action integrations every day, so check the Actions section to see what we support natively. Of course, we can't support every possible integration, so we allow custom actions to be built with REST requests. Building a custom action is out of the scope of this blog post, but we'll be doing a separate post about creating custom actions soon, so check back.

With the knowledge base complete and actions integrated, we're almost done! All that's left is to integrate your new chatbot on your website and social media accounts.

Head on over to Connections to hook up social media accounts. You'll also see an embed tag looking something like this:

<script src="https://www.sidekickai.co/static/embed.js" access_token=your_access_token_here></script>

To add your Sidekick to your website, just copy that tag and paste it anywhere on any page you want your Sidekick to be on, and it will automatically load up and show in the bottom corner!

Congratulations, you just built a chatbot! Now head over to the Sidekick section and try talking to it!