ChatGPT is OpenAI's chatbot, and out of the box it knows nothing about your business.
If you run a small business and use ChatGPT for planning, how much does it know about how your business works?
How much should it know about your products and company? What personal data will it have access to if you use it to generate personalized documents?
Out of the box, a chatbot is unlikely to have the information to solve your problem, so it needs more data about you or your company. Data supplies the fuel for ChatGPT, so without sufficient data on any topic, ChatGPT is just a book with some key chapters missing.
Giving ChatGPT your own data lets you customize it for your domain and make it respond to your specific requirements. But how?
Well, there are two efficient ways to do this:
Using ChatGPT Custom GPTs
Using Wonderchat.io's customer service agent
This guide walks through the Wonderchat route step by step. Wonderchat suits a founder or first support hire with a help center: the agent answers only from your content, says when it can't find the answer, and hands over with the full chat.
What Exactly is a Custom-Trained ChatGPT AI Chatbot? How Does it Work?
A custom ChatGPT chatbot is a chatbot built on OpenAI's models that answers using specific data or instructions you give it.
These chatbots learn to respond to common queries, commands, and other topics that may interest a business using custom data sources like text documents, FAQs, knowledge bases, or customer support data.
You can create a chatbot that answers from your own business content, so its replies follow what your documents say.
A chatbot only knows what is in the content you give it, so it stays current only if you keep that content current.
Step-by-step guide: how to set up an AI agent on your own data with Wonderchat
Here is why Wonderchat suits the job when you want a chatbot that answers from your own data:
Setup is a handful of steps, listed below. 80% of Wonderchat agents that go live do so the same day.
Wonderchat is SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, EU-hosted in Frankfurt, with a HIPAA BAA available. The AI model is a setting, chosen by plan, from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and DeepSeek, and answers come only from your content.
Wonderchat answers customer questions from your own help center, docs and files. The same agent can also reply to people on Telegram, and the Telegram integration guide covers connecting a bot. Channels: website chat, email, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams, with Slack and WhatsApp from Starter and Microsoft Teams from Basic.
You add the agent to your website with an embed code. Paste the embed code anywhere you want the chat widget to appear for visitors.
Wonderchat has a free plan that refills 50 AI replies every month, with no credit card.
Here is how to get started with Wonderchat.
Step 1: Sign Up and Create a Chatbot
Create your profile by signing up for Wonderchat at this link.
Initially, you will only be asked to provide an email and password.
After you register and log in, you land on the bot creator screen. On the first page, you should click the New Chatbot option.
Step 2: Add Data Sources to Your Chatbot
Next, add the data sources to the chatbot.
You can add your content by uploading files, fetching your existing website, typing text yourself or adding question and answer pairs.
To integrate data from your computer, you must go to the file uploading feature, pick a particular file you saved on the device, and click Create chatbot.
To type your own text, use the text area on the left sidebar, then click Create chatbot once you are done.
To train the website, click on this item in the left column, then give the address in the text area in the middle and click the 'Fetch links' button. When you are done, press the 'Create chatbot' button.
To add questions and answers manually, click Q&A on the left sidebar, fill in the question and answer fields, and press 'Create chatbot.'
Once you have added one data source or a mix of them, you land on the chatbot page, where you can talk with your chatbot.
Choose Settings at the top of a page to set up the most basic settings. Alternatively, click Embed on-site for the script code you should put on your site to embed your chatbot.
Once created and through the platform, you can talk to the bot directly or through any website or channel where the chatbot is embedded.
Final Words
You now know two ways to give a chatbot your own data: a Custom GPT, or a Wonderchat agent that answers from your content.
With Wonderchat, the agent answers only from your own content, shows the source on every reply and tells you what your docs can't answer.
When no page covers a question, the agent says so, offers a person, and the question lands in a review inbox for you to answer once. You can create an agent on the free plan from the Wonderchat website.
