Every business website has a chatbot now. Most are useless — scripted flows that frustrate visitors into leaving.
Here's how to build one that actually works.
User types message → Your backend → LLM API → Response back to user
That's it. No NLP pipelines, no intent classification, no dialog trees. Just a language model with a good system prompt.
The difference between a good chatbot and a bad one isn't the model — it's the prompt. Here's what works:
You are a helpful assistant for [Company]. You help visitors understand our services.
We offer: [list your services]
Our pricing: [list your tiers]
Our process: [describe how you work]
Keep responses to 2-3 sentences. Be friendly and professional.
If you don't know something, say so and suggest they contact us.
Feed it everything about your business. The model handles the rest.
We use Groq's free API running Llama 3 70B for client chatbots:
- Free tier (30 requests/minute)
- Fastest inference available (~500 tokens/sec)
- Quality comparable to GPT-4 for simple Q&A
- No credit card needed
For a business chatbot answering "what services do you offer?" and "how much does it cost?" — Llama 3 on Groq is more than enough.
Don't overthink chatbots. A language model with a detailed system prompt, served through a simple API endpoint, outperforms 95% of scripted chatbot solutions. Build it in an afternoon, deploy it today.