Building a Chatbot¶
A chatbot is the basic unit of organization in Illinois Chat: an assistant scoped to a topic, course, research group, or team. Documents in one chatbot are completely isolated from every other chatbot; retrieval never crosses chatbot boundaries.
Chatbot, project, course
The app's routes, settings and API call a chatbot a project (course_name in API payloads), and older material says course. These docs say chatbot; technical identifiers stay as they are in the product.
Chatbot URL¶
Every chatbot gets a permanent, shareable URL based on its name:
Names must be unique across the instance and become part of the URL, so pick something short and recognizable (for example ece-408 or soil-science-lab). New chatbots start out private.
The builder screens¶
The sidebar of a chatbot you can edit has one entry per screen:
| Screen | What you do there |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | Upload files, import from Canvas, a website or GitHub, manage Project Files, open Sharing and Access, set Branding (greeting, example questions, logo) and Tags. See Uploading files, Web crawling, Importing, Document groups & deleting, Sharing & access. |
| LLMs | Add provider keys, enable models, pick the default model. See LLMs. |
| Analysis | Usage statistics and conversation exports. See Analysis & exports. |
| Prompting | The system prompt and behaviour switches such as Guided Learning. See Prompting. |
| Tools | Connect a Sim AI workspace so deployed workflows become tools. See Tools. |
| API | Generate and rotate your API key. See the API Reference. |
Users see only the Chat screen, described in Using a chatbot.
Roles¶
| Role | Stored as | Capabilities |
|---|---|---|
| Owner | course_owner |
The person who created the chatbot. Everything administrators can do. |
| Administrators | course_admins |
Edit every builder screen: documents, LLMs, prompt, tools, sharing, analytics and exports. |
| Members | approved_emails_list |
Chat with the chatbot when it is private. |
Owners and administrators are set in the Sharing and Access dialog; see Sharing & access. API keys belong to a user, not to a chatbot, and work on every chatbot that user can edit — see API authentication.
Next steps¶
- Quickstart — the whole flow in five minutes.
- How It Works — what happens to the documents you add and to each question.