Chatbot Addon

The Chatbot Addon adds an AI assistant inside the FlipBook viewer. Readers can ask questions about your document and get instant, source-cited answers — without having to scroll through every page. Great for technical manuals, catalogs, research reports, and training materials.

What it adds

• AI chat panel inside the FlipBook viewer.
• Source citations — Each answer points to the page it came from, and readers can click to jump to that page.
• Per-FlipBook knowledge — The bot only answers from the FlipBook's content, not the open internet.
• Multiple AI providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, or any OpenAI-compatible API endpoint.
• Prompt customization — Set tone, restrictions, and fallback messages per FlipBook.
• Conversation history — Sessions are preserved while the reader is on the page.
• Rate limiting — Per-IP and per-session caps to control API usage.

Installation

1. Download the addon zip.
2. Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin → upload → activate.
3. Activate the license under FlipBooks → License.
4. Add your AI provider API key under FlipBooks → Settings → Chatbot.

Requires the main TNC FlipBook 3D plugin and an API key from your chosen AI provider.

How to use

After adding your API key, the chat panel becomes available on every FlipBook. To tune behavior per FlipBook, open the Chatbot tab in the FlipBook metabox and configure:

• Enable chatbot — Toggle on for this FlipBook.
• Welcome message — Greeting shown when the panel opens.
• System prompt — Instructions that shape tone, scope, and behavior. Defaults to "Answer questions strictly from this document".
• Suggested questions — Quick-start prompts shown to the reader.
• Rate limit — Maximum questions per session or per IP.

The bot pulls answers from the text extracted from your PDF, so make sure your PDFs are text-based (not scanned images). Run OCR on scanned PDFs before uploading.

Costs

Each question consumes tokens from your AI provider account. Typical costs:

• A short Q&A round trip with GPT-4 class models: roughly $0.01–0.05.
• A long document with many sessions: a few dollars per month.

Set rate limits to prevent runaway costs.

FAQ

Will the bot answer questions about things not in the FlipBook? By default, no. The system prompt restricts answers to the document content. You can loosen this per FlipBook if you want a more general assistant.

Which AI provider should I use? Anthropic Claude and OpenAI GPT-4 give the most accurate document Q&A. Gemini and self-hosted models work too if you prefer those.

Is the document content sent to the AI provider? Yes — the relevant text passages are sent with each question so the AI can ground its answer. The full document is not uploaded; only the matching excerpts go with each query.