Attendant – Free AI Site Search & Chatbot

Description

Attendant adds a free AI chatbot to your WordPress site. Visitors ask questions in the chat, and it answers using your own posts, pages, and products, with buttons that take them straight to the right page. It is a chatbot, an AI assistant, and a smart site search in one chat widget.

It runs on Google Gemini’s free plan. One free key, no credit card, ever. Prefer OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT? That works too.

What it does for your visitors

• Answers questions instantly, day and night, in plain language
• Finds the right post, page, or product and shows it as a clickable button
• Understands detailed requests like “3 bedroom apartments in Lisbon under 500K”
• Answers questions about your business, like “what is your return policy?”
• Shows tap-to-answer buttons so visitors can choose instead of typing
• Suggests real alternatives from your site when nothing matches
• Remembers the conversation while they browse, even across open tabs
• Hands them to a real person when the AI cannot help, without leaving the chat

What it does for you

• Free to run with a Google Gemini key. No credit card, no monthly fee
• Answers the repeat customer support questions so you do not have to
• Sets itself up: a short wizard, then it learns your content on its own
• Works with WooCommerce products, custom fields (ACF, MetaBox), and any post type
• Collects leads: it can offer a callback, take the visitor’s email, and send it to you. Off by default
• Passes captured leads to your newsletter or CRM plugin if you use one
• Talks to your team in Slack: when the AI falls short, the visitor can ask for a person, and you answer from a Slack thread while they stay on your site
• Lets you add your own questions and answers that the chatbot always uses first
• Spending limits you control, so the chat can never run up a surprise bill
• Private by design: chats stay in the visitor’s browser and IP addresses are never stored

Great for

• Online stores: help shoppers find products by price, category, or feature
• Real estate sites: find properties by price, bedrooms, and location
• Job boards, event sites, directories, and listing sites
• Business and service sites that get the same questions every day
• Blogs and content sites with a big archive to search

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0 or higher and PHP 8.0 or higher
• A free Google Gemini key (no credit card), or an OpenAI key if you prefer
• For the optional Slack handover: a Slack workspace, and a site Slack can reach over the internet (it will not work on a local install)

External services

This plugin connects to the AI provider you choose in Settings: Google Gemini (recommended, free tier) or OpenAI. This is required for the AI chat features: the provider turns a visitor’s natural-language question into a structured search of your own content and writes the answer.

What is sent, and when: only when a visitor sends a chat message, the plugin sends that message text plus the titles and short excerpts of the matching content from your own site to your chosen provider. If you enable the optional Semantic Q&A mode, the text of your selected content is also sent to that provider during indexing to generate embeddings. Your API key, your full database, and IP addresses are never sent. Nothing is sent until you add your own API key and turn the chat widget on. Both are off by default. The plugin only ever talks to the one provider you configure.

Note on Google’s free tier: Google’s terms allow content submitted on the free tier to be used to improve their services. Attendant only sends your public website content and visitor chat messages. Review Google’s terms if that matters for your site.

Google Gemini API, provided by Google LLC:

• Terms: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms
• Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy

OpenAI API, provided by OpenAI, L.L.C.:

• Terms of Use: https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use
• Privacy Policy: https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy
• API data usage policies: https://openai.com/policies/api-data-usage-policies

Slack, provided by Slack Technologies, LLC (a Salesforce company). Only used if you connect Slack for the live handover, which is off by default and does nothing until you finish the setup wizard.

What is sent, and when: only when a visitor asks to speak to a person, the plugin sends the recent conversation (their messages and the assistant’s replies) plus a short summary of what they need to the Slack channel you chose. While that handover is open, each new message the visitor sends is posted to the same Slack thread, and each reply your team writes there is sent back to the visitor’s chat. Nothing is sent to Slack at any other time. Your Slack credentials are stored encrypted on your own site and are never sent anywhere except to Slack itself.

• Slack API Terms of Service: https://slack.com/terms-of-service/api
• Slack Privacy Policy: https://slack.com/trust/privacy/privacy-policy

Privacy

Four features can handle personal data. All are OFF by default and only do anything once you, the site owner, turn them on.

Conversation history (in the visitor’s browser). The chat keeps a copy of the current conversation in the visitor’s own browser using localStorage so it survives page changes and refreshes. This data never leaves the visitor’s device except as the normal chat messages already described above. It is not stored on your server or in your database. The visitor can clear it at any time with the “New chat” button or by clearing their browser storage.

Conversation logging to files (optional, off by default). When you enable file logging in Settings, the plugin writes each exchange (the visitor’s message and the assistant’s reply) to a dated log file in a protected folder inside your uploads directory, so you can review how the assistant is used. IP addresses are never stored. Session identifiers are stored only as short one-way hashes used to group a single conversation. Logs are kept for 30 days and then deleted automatically, and only a logged-in administrator can download them. No conversation data is sent anywhere by this feature; the files stay on your server.

Callback / lead capture (optional, off by default). When you enable lead capture and a visitor explicitly agrees to be contacted, the plugin collects the email address the visitor provides (and, if they choose, a phone number and a preferred time) and emails that request to the address you configure, using your site’s normal email. It is rate-limited to one request per conversation and a daily maximum. This information is handled by whatever email service your WordPress site already uses; the plugin does not store it in a database or send it to any third party of its own.

Live handover to Slack (optional, off by default). When a visitor asks to speak to a person, the conversation is sent to your Slack workspace as described under External services above, and stays readable by whoever is in that Slack channel. The plugin keeps the link between a chat and its Slack thread on your own server for 24 hours and then discards it. IP addresses are never sent. If you use this feature, your visitors’ messages are handled by Slack under Slack’s own privacy policy, and you should say so in your privacy policy.

You are responsible for disclosing these features in your own privacy policy if you enable them.