I think Discord is where these bots belong. For starters, it’s a context where people expect to chat. People are also accustomed to interacting with bots there, even before the rise of generative AI. And most importantly, unlike when it’s embedded on a website, in Discord the bot can be supervised, corrected by members of the community. You could probably even set up a system where the reactions of certain users, e.g. the project’s maintainers, get fed to the model as training data. I think this could work really well.
One obvious downside is that people may be more reluctant to ask embarrassing questions in public. Though, you could allow DMs to the bot to help with that.
> in Discord the bot can be supervised, corrected by members of the community.
I have volunteered to answer questions on IRC, sometimes ones that require quite a bit of research. But when I do that, there’s a human on the other end that can learn and at least move in the direction of not having that problem again. I don’t think I’ll ever spend my time correcting the mistakes of a bot that will just as confidently make them time and time again.
One obvious downside is that people may be more reluctant to ask embarrassing questions in public. Though, you could allow DMs to the bot to help with that.