ChatGPT has revolutionized chatbots. It changed what people expected from Taobot, so we had to step up in a huge way. Here's the result.

The new taobot is powered by ChatGPT. You can try it out here: https://taobot.io/chat

Scope

With that being said, it's not just ChatGPT with a few instructions, it has been custom trained on hundreds of datasets, including:

• the taobot knowledge base
• the best youtube guides
• the repladies wiki
• relevant reddit guides
• JadeShip Sellers

This was a long process, we had to start over multiple times because we just weren't happy with the results.

The old Taobot

Previously, taobot was a Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services powered chatbot. We definitely didn't cheap out, it was really expensive, but it could still only retrieve articles from the knowledge base. The creativity was 0.

Advantages

Creativity

ChatGPT is a lot better when it comes to creativity, taobot is now more flexible than ever. You can ask questions in a natural way and it will adjust its answer according.

You can also combine different questions in one, for instance you can ask how to buy make a Superbuy account and start shipping, the old version would have decided between giving you a registration guide or shipping guide - the new taobot is able to do both in one answer.

Of course creativity can't come at the cost of correctness. That's why we are closely monitoring and finetuning the responses. But we can already see a great improvement compared to the old Taobot.

Dynamic Sources

A highlight is that it has more dynamic sources now, not just a static knowledge base. It frequently gets retrained on the latest seller contacts, so you can ask it about any sellers WeChat contact, website and other links.

Other dynamic sources we want to add are the JadeShip Shipping Calculator and even a source for items, something previously unthinkable.

Other ChatGPT features you got used to

Taobot also comes with other features that you quickly got used to with ChatGPT: conversation history/memory and procedurally generating answers.

Discord Bot

Taobot now comes with a public discord bot, that has the full capabilities of the bot on the webpage. It's using conversation memory and can be triggered by using a slash command: /taobot.

The old discord bot was trigged by channel name, it would answer every time someone said something in #support. The new discord bot is less spammy.

The discord bot is free to use and invite for any discord admin.

You can find the invite link and more infos here: https://taobot.io/bot/discord

Updates to the rest of the website

The whole website has been redone by myself.

The knowledge base is now better at showing different text styles in the questions, such as rendering lists correctly. Even with all the new and dynamic sources, the knowledge base is still the gray matter of taobot. It will keep getting updates and it's still the place for the highest quality informational resources.

Taobot now has a page for the questions, that have been added or modified last. This allows you to quickly grasp what's going on, or to just find something interesting to read: https://taobot.io/knowledge-base/latest

The roadmap page is a place to get a quick summary of this post and to quickly get updates.

We're also very excited to see the new feedback features in action. Every chatbot message and knowledge base post can be rated. This feedback is very helpful to weed out incorrect information and to reinforce what's right.

Closing thoughts

I did not plan a Taobot update. The old taobot was hugely popular for what it was, and it was probably the last of our sites that needed an update. What convinced me to still go down this path was to try to build a ChatGPT-based service, purely out of curiosity. I'm very happy with the result and hope that the new taobot can continue the great legacy of the original release.