Meet our new Business Support Hub AI Chatbot

A key part of our business support programme is the delivery of an online Business Support Hub. The website is a central resource hub for the tourism and events industry with valuable, actionable insights in a user-friendly structure.

This week, we've launched new functionality to our Business Support Hub website – our brand-new AI (Artificial Intelligence) Chatbot function. 

When given a question or prompt, the Chatbot will quickly provide a response with the relevant information, tools, resources and links matching the search. Ultimately, this will help to reduce the time users spend looking for the content that equips them to improve and grow their tourism and events business.

How does it work?

When given a query or prompt, the AI Chatbot quickly searches the Business Support Hub website to identify the top three most relevant pages. Based on the information across these three pages, the AI Chatbot will generate a response directly from the content found. 

It will only generate responses from pages within the Business Support Hub and doesn’t search external websites. This prevents the response including false or misleading answers, also known as "hallucinations".  

You may want to ask things like: 

• “How do I get a short term lets license?” 
• “How can I use social media to market my business?" 
• “How do I work with a tour operator?” 

Our expert team

As it only creates answers from our own website, the AI Chatbot does not learn for itself – and it needs to be taught.

Our colleagues can work on the back-end of the website to teach the Bot which pages to refer to for any given search, helping to improve the accuracy of responses. 

The platform we’re using for this functionality is Cludo, which also powers the search functionalities on VisitScotland.org and visitscotland.com.