- Choose a starting point. Choose “New chatbot” and pick a template:
- Unit Q&A assistant: answers questions about due dates, requirements and the unit outline.
- Socratic tutor: asks guiding questions instead of giving answers.
- Simulated patient or client: lets students practise history-taking and communication.
- Revision quizzer: asks questions from your material and gives feedback.
- Assessment helper with limits: helps students understand a brief without writing anything for them.
- Debate opponent or persona: argues the other side or plays a historical or professional figure.
- Answer the setup questions. Give the chatbot a name your students will recognise, your unit and discipline, the student level, what students should use it for, what it must never do, how it should answer and its tone. For a simulated patient or persona, describe who it plays: their situation, what they know and feel, how they behave, and what they reveal only when asked the right question. Add anything else it should know, such as key dates, where things are in your LMS, or common mistakes students make.
- Let the AI write the instructions. Choose “Write my chatbot”. The AI turns your answers into the chatbot’s instructions, a welcome message and up to four suggested first questions for students to tap. You can edit any of it on the Instructions tab, or change your answers and have the instructions rewritten. Safety rules are always added on top and can’t be removed: the chatbot tells students it is an AI, stays on your topic, never writes assessable work, reminds health students that nothing it says is clinical advice, and refuses to reveal or change its instructions.
- Add your material. On the Material tab, upload Word (.docx) and PowerPoint (.pptx) files, or paste text such as an FAQ; these are free. PDFs of up to 60 pages are read by the AI so that scanned pages, tables and figures are included, and you see the progress as it reads; the price is shown before you add one. For each student question the chatbot finds the most relevant passages and cites them, for example “Unit outline — Assessment 2” or “Week 3 slides, slide 4”. You can remove any material at any time.
- Test it as a student would. On the Test tab, ask the questions your students will ask, including the awkward ones. Under each reply you can see which material it used. When a reply is wrong, too long or gives too much away, choose “Fix this” and say what it should have done, for example “Say Assessment 2 is due Friday of Week 9 at 5pm” or “Don’t give the formula; ask what they already know about clearance”. The correction is saved, it always wins over the instructions, and “Ask again” shows you the difference. Test messages are charged to your own balance, not the chatbot’s budget.
- Set the access and the budget. On the Share tab, choose an access code students type once (optional), the websites allowed to embed the chatbot (optional), and the dates it opens and closes. Set a credit budget for student messages and a daily message limit per student. Student messages are paid from your credits in blocks, and the chatbot never spends more than its budget. You get an email when 80% of the budget is used, and again if it runs out or your balance gets too low, at which point the chatbot pauses until you add more.
- Go live and share it. Set the status to Live. Copy the link and post it in your LMS, or copy the embed code into a Canvas page or a Moodle page or label using the editor’s HTML view. Some institutions block embedded content, but the link always works. Students need no account. They see your welcome message, the suggested questions and a notice that they’re chatting with an AI that can make mistakes and that you can read conversations but not who wrote them. Set the status to Paused at any time to switch it off.
- See what students are asking. On the Insights tab you can see how many conversations and student messages there have been, and read each conversation (they’re anonymous and deleted automatically after a set period). Once there are enough messages, “Write the report” produces a short report on what students ask about most, where they seem confused, and what you could do about it in your teaching.
Every action’s credit cost is shown on its own button before you commit to it. Nothing is charged silently. You can delete a chatbot at any time; its material and all its conversations are deleted with it and the link stops working.