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ChatbotIQ

How to Use the Bot Playground

The Playground is your all-in-one workspace for designing, testing, and deploying your chatbot. It has three tabs: Design, Embed, and MCP.

Open the Playground

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Go to Bots and click “Design & Deploy” on any bot. The Playground opens in full screen.

The header includes a gear icon (⚙) that opens your bot’s settings directly — no need to leave the Playground.

Design tab: test and customize

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This is the main workspace. You’ll see two panels:

Left: Live preview A real-time preview of your chat widget, shown on top of a background that matches your website. You can:

  • Chat with your bot to test its answers.
  • Toggle between desktop and mobile preview modes.
  • Open the Debug panel at the bottom for technical details about each response.

Right: Widget Designer All the customization options for your widget’s appearance — colors, layout, launcher, typography, and more. Changes appear instantly in the preview. See Customize Widget Appearance for details.

Use the Debug panel

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The Debug panel is one of the most powerful features in ChatbotIQ. It shows you exactly what happens behind the scenes when your bot answers a question:

  • Enhanced query — the optimized version of the user’s question used for searching your content.
  • Retrieval metrics — relevance threshold, number of content matches, and filtered results.
  • Relevance ranking — how results were scored and ordered by relevance.
  • Source citations — the exact content pieces used, with relevance scores for each.
  • Token usage — how many tokens were consumed.
  • Response time — how long the answer took to generate.

This is your best tool for improving answer quality. If the bot gives a wrong answer, check the Debug panel to see whether the right content was retrieved. If not, you may need to adjust your crawling settings or RAG threshold.

Chat features

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When chatting with your bot (in the Playground or via the widget), you get:

  • Streaming responses — text appears word by word as the AI generates it.
  • Markdown rendering — responses can include bold text, lists, code blocks with syntax highlighting, links, and images.
  • Source citations — numbered superscript links in the text, with a footer listing the cited pages.
  • Suggested questions — starter prompts that appear when the conversation is empty.
  • Copy — hover over any bot message to copy it.
  • Thumbs up / down — rate each response to provide feedback.

Embed tab: get the code

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Switch to the Embed tab to get the code snippet for your website. See Embed the Widget for full instructions.

MCP tab: connect AI tools

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The MCP tab lets you expose your bot as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. This allows AI coding assistants and other MCP-compatible tools to search your knowledge base directly. See Connect via MCP for setup instructions.

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