Sohay — AI Chatbot for Knowledge Base & Support

Sohay adds an AI chat widget to your WordPress site that answers visitor questions from the articles you publish. You write articles in the built-in Knowledge Base, and the chatbot looks up the best matches before it replies — so it stays on-topic and uses your real content instead of guessing.

Designed with WooCommerce stores in mind, but works on any WordPress site. Every conversation is saved in a built-in inbox under Sohay → Conversations — your team can read, search, filter, assign, and reply from one place.

Why site owners pick Sohay

• Answers from your own content — the chatbot reads the articles you publish in your Knowledge Base. It doesn’t make up product details or invent prices.
• No coding to set up — paste an OpenAI API key, publish a few articles, click “Sync All Articles”. The widget appears on every page.
• A real inbox for your team — every conversation is saved. Search, filter by status, assign one to a teammate, or reply yourself.
• Predictable costs — set a daily OpenAI token cap and the plugin stops calling OpenAI for the rest of the day once you hit it. A runaway loop or a hostile bot can’t drain your account overnight.
• GDPR-friendly out of the box — conversations are stored on your own site, in your own database. Signed-in visitors’ chats flow through WordPress’s built-in Export / Erase Personal Data tools; anonymous guest chats (which have no email to match on) are erased by deleting them from the Conversations inbox. See Privacy below.
• Designed for WooCommerce, works anywhere — declares HPOS and Cart-Checkout-Blocks compatibility, but the chat widget and Knowledge Base work on any WordPress site.

What’s included

• A chat widget that drops into every page (you can hide it on pages you don’t want it on).
• A Knowledge Base section in the WordPress admin, with a “Sync All Articles” button.
• A Conversations admin where you can read, search, filter, assign, reply, pin, and close chats.
• An AI Settings screen for picking the OpenAI model, writing the welcome message, and setting daily spend caps.
• A Diagnostics screen that shows today’s OpenAI token usage and the most recent plugin log entries.
• Fast page loads — the chat code only downloads when a visitor actually opens the chat, not on every page view.
• Your OpenAI key is encrypted in the database and never shown in the admin UI after you save it.

You’ll need

• A WordPress site running version 6.6 or later, on PHP 8.1 or later.
• An OpenAI account and API key. You pay OpenAI directly for the model usage — Sohay does not resell access. A typical small support site stays in single-digit dollars per month.

External services

Sohay sends data to OpenAI (https://openai.com) to generate chat answers and index your Knowledge Base. Without an OpenAI account and API key, the plugin has no upstream model to call and the chat widget cannot answer questions.

What is sent, and when

• When a visitor sends a chat message — the message text and recent conversation history are forwarded over HTTPS to https://api.openai.com/v1/responses (or the equivalent streaming endpoint for the model you selected) and processed by the OpenAI model configured under Sohay → AI Settings.
• When you publish or update a Knowledge Base article — the title and body are sent in the background to OpenAI Files and Vector Stores (https://api.openai.com/v1/files, /v1/vector_stores, /v1/vector_stores/*/files) so the chat can retrieve them. The sync runs in the background, not while you click Save.
• When you open AI Settings — the plugin makes a one-off call to https://api.openai.com/v1/models to populate the model-picker dropdown.

Where it goes

All requests go to api.openai.com over HTTPS. The plugin does not contact any other external service — no analytics, no telemetry, no third-party fonts or CDN assets, and no phone-home for updates. Updates come from WordPress.org.

How your API key is handled

The OpenAI API key you enter under AI Settings authenticates every request. It is encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM) in your WordPress database, masked in the admin UI after the first save, and excluded from the WordPress REST API. The plugin never sends the key anywhere other than api.openai.com.

Your responsibilities

Before activating the plugin, please review OpenAI’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Site owners are responsible for obtaining the appropriate legal basis (consent, contract, legitimate interest, etc.) to share visitor messages with OpenAI under GDPR, CCPA, and other applicable privacy regimes in the jurisdictions they operate in.

Privacy

Conversations and messages are stored in custom database tables on your own site.

For signed-in visitors, the plugin registers WordPress’s personal-data exporter and eraser, so the standard Tools → Export Personal Data and Tools → Erase Personal Data flows include their Sohay conversations, matched on their account email.

Anonymous (logged-out) visitors’ chats aren’t tied to an email address, so those email-based tools can’t locate them. To erase a specific guest conversation, open it under Sohay → Conversations and delete it (available to users with the AI-settings capability); it leaves the inbox immediately and is permanently purged after the retention window — 30 days by default, filterable in code. A visitor can also delete their own chat from the widget, and every soft-delete follows the same purge path.

See the External services section above for what gets sent to OpenAI.