Assistant (AI)

This plugin adds an AI Assistant to your WordPress site. It can execute the abilities provided by WP itself or other plugins and themes.

The “abilities” are something new added to WP 6.9, and almost surely, they’ll be embraced by many plugins, creating a full set of functionalities that can be controlled using an AI assistant.

This plugin shows all the abilities available, grouped by categories, and lets you interact with them.

See the GitHub repo, or for quick installation, the instructions below.

First installation

You need to download the ZIP package and install it from Plugins/Add New/Upload.

After the first installation, the plugin should update automatically.

You can always update it by hand, downloading and reinstalling the ZIP.

Download the Assistant plugin

Configuration

New! With WP 7.0, you can configure the API key for AI providers on the new WP/Settings/Connectors. The plugin detects these keys and offers the possibility to use them.

Being an AI-based assistant, you need to get and set an API key to use an AI provider, for example, Gemini, Claude, Mistral, or OpenAI.

Search, for example, on Google, how to get an OpenAI API key and get one (they provide a decent volume of use free of charge). This is a video I found, and it’s clear enough.

I’ve tested the four cited providers.

Keys as constants on wp-config.php

If you prefer to set the key as a constant in the wp-config.php file, you can use:

define('CONSTANT_NAME', 'api key...');

Constant names are:

  • MISTRAL_API_KEY
  • OPENAI_API_KEY

That is a standard, even the new WP Connectors recognize them.

Administrative Assistant

The first thing you want to try is the administrative assistant. You can select a category of abilities to be made available to the assistant and start a conversation asking for action, analysis, and so on.

For plugin authors

If you’re a plugin author and want to add an assistant to your administrative page, you can simply use the PHP function:

if (function_exists('assistant_admin_chat)) {
    assistant_admin_chat(['category1', 'category2']);
} else {
    echo 'You need to install the Satollo Assistant plugin.
}

The categories are ability category slugs; you probably want to add your own categories but you can enrich the assistant adding other plugins’ capabilities.

Public assistants

To expose on your site a public assistant that can be used by visitors or logged-in users, you can create one or more public assistants from the Assistant admin side, setting the abilities you want to expose.

Then you’ll get a shortcode, which you can use on a public page.

To test a public assistant with the Newsletter plugin installed on this site, use this link to be recognized as “demo” newsletter subscriber and then move to the Assistant page.

There isn’t a Gutenberg block yet; be patient.

Exposed abilities are created by third-party plugins, and they’re responsible for permission checks and what they do. Be very careful and informed before making them available to the public.

Assistant shortcode attributes

You can use the attributes to add more than one assistant to a single page and have just one shown.

  • logged_in [true|false] If specific shows the assistant to logged-in or not logged-in users. If not present, the assistant is always visible.

Experimental

This is an experimental plugin, and it can lead to weird behaviours. Not always is the underlying AI able to understand you or to execute exactly the task you asked for.

And the “abilities” could be missing some important features or defined in a way that the AI won’t be able to use them at all, or in the correct way.

It’s something growing.

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