Updates January 2024

Its been a busy month! Here is a summary of the key updates to the system:

1) Time since last message is now included in the model prompt, so that the bot can distinguish between an ongoing conversation and a follow-up query a week later, for example.

2) We've added in a persistent summary about the business owner that is also inserted into model prompts. OpenAI's threads in the Assistants API aren't the clearest about how long they save conversation history. As best as I can understand it after reading the documentation, particular messages are saved for 30 days and threads are deleted after 60 days without use. So we generate a user history based on conversation to date, and will set that to update regularly. This is obviously done by GPT4 as well, with the following prompt: {This spreadsheet contains the full record of a conversation between an AI business coach chatbot and a business owner. Generate a one paragraph summary about the owner. This summary will be used to give the chatbot context when providing advice to them in the future, so focus on details that would be useful context for a chatbot working as a business coach for this person. This should include a description of their business/sector, note their key business problems, and list what business topics have already been discussed with them. This description will be inserted in future model queries so write efficiently to save tokens. Don't include evidence for your summary (like quotes from the chat) or any other language that won't help customize future model queries.} Hopefully as the Assistants API improves, we'll be able to make the threads persistent, but this is a work-around for now.

3) We've migrated from Zapier to Make.com for middleware. Zapier is easy but expensive, make.com requires a bit more effort but works well and is much lower cost, which also allows for building much more logic into the system (such as #1 and #2 above). Thankfully, with the help of ChatGPT even a civilian like me can bang out some JSON payloads with ease. Here is an overview of the scenario

Next up is a customization for a new sector. We are curretly testing with Bodega (small retail shop) owners in Peru, of which there are almost 500,000. We have started on a new customied model for a pretty different sector: coffee growers. There are over 200,000 small-scale coffee growers in Peru, and a truly disorienting number of training manuals and best practices guides.