How to Add AI to your Website with Thesys Agent Builder to Build a PHP Billing Software Chatbot in Practice

In this article, you will learn about the following:

1. What Do You Want Your ChatBot Application to Do

2. Why is it Good for a Developer to Use a Chatbot Builder Application

3. What Steps a Developer Should Follow to Build a Chatbot Agent

4. How Can You Take Advantage of the Thesys Chatbot Agent Builder

1. What Do You Want Your ChatBot Application to Do

In the previous article, I explained that a chatbot is an automated tool that can respond automatically to chat messages sent by users of a website or application.

So the first thing that you need to do is to create a plan to determine what your chatbot application will do.

For this article we will create a plan to list the features that we want the chatbot to have when the users of the chatbot want to have information about the bills that they have to pay to the company that is implementing this chatbot to provide automated support.

The initial plan is usually very simple. We start with a plan for a chatbot that only has one feature. In this case we want the chatbot to be able to provide details to let users pay the current bills with pending payments.

Over time we can evolve the plan for the chatbot to provide more useful features or allow more options provided by the current features.

2. Why is it Good for a Developer to Use a Chatbot Builder Application

After you have an initial plan for your chatbot, you move on to the implementation.

A chatbot is just one type of Web application. So you develop a chatbot using traditional web development components that can use PHP to generate HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and serve images to make it work and look nice.

Usually web projects developed this way take a lot of work to be implemented.

If you are developing a chatbot for a customer, often they do not have a good idea of what it takes to develop a Web application with good quality. So it is usual to find customers that always want applications to be implemented in much less time than it is possible.

One way to implement web applications faster is to use tools to automate the development of parts of the application.

A chatbot builder application is a tool that can do precisely the automation of parts of the development process.

The Thesys Chatbot Agent Builder is a good example of this kind of automation tool.

Thesys provides a platform to build chatbot agents. An agent is the part of your application that you can use to define the specific behaviors of your chatbot application.

An agent can integrate with the chat system to receive chat requests and return chat responses.

To demonstrate in practice how the Thesys Chat Agent Builder tool can be used, let me show you the steps that you can follow to build your own chatbot agent.

3.1. Prompt creation to request what you want the application to do

First you need to go to Thesys Chatbot Agent Builder tool page use the Build for free button:

Then you arrive on the page that asks you: What should your agent do

In our example, I have typed:

Provide a menu to ask the user if he wants to get the details to pay pending bills

3.2. Agent instruction review

The Thesys Chatbot Agent Builder will try to improve your request and provide improved instructions for your agent.

You need to review these agent instructions to confirm that the suggested agent instructions match what you want your chatbot agent to do.

3.3. Data source definition

In the example chatbot agent, the agent may retrieve data about user bills from data sources like CSV files that the developer can upload to the Thesys Chatbot Agent Builder, cloud-based databases, or remote sites accessible via HTTP requests.

3.4. Define your agent with prompts and instructions

Then you can define what your agent will do by specifying prompts that the agent will be ready to process and instructions that the users may follow to accomplish what they want to do.

3.5. Add apps, connect MCP servers, and configure capabilities

The responses to the user prompt requests can be generated using any of several applications that the Thesys Chatbot Agent Builder supports.

A custom MCP (Model Context Protocol) server can also be used to generate responses to the user prompts. An MCP server is basically an API that responds to requests of prompt-based artificial intelligence tools to generate the correct response to the end user.

A developer can add its own MCP server to customize the responses of the chatbot to the user prompts: 

3.6. Test and iterate on your agent in real time

The Thesys Chatbot Agent Builder allows the developer to preview what will be displayed to the user after he uses the defined prompts.

4. How Can You Take Advantage of the Thesys Chatbot Agent Builder

The Thesys Chatbot Agent Builder can do a lot of work to help developers to finish the chatbots they develop for customers faster.

In conclusion, the developer may only have to develop an API to implement an MCP server that will provide customized responses to the chatbot user prompts.

If you would like to use the Thesys Chatbot Agent Builder for free now using a limited number of API requests. That is enough for a developer to work on a chatbot until it is ready to deliver to a customer.