Overview

Description

AI Assistant — support that answers while you sleep

Your members ask the same questions at 2am that you answer every morning. AI Assistant replies for you. Mention its account in any topic and it answers in seconds — grounded in your own community's content, in your own words, on your own terms.

It runs on your API key with your provider. No subscription to us, no per-seat pricing, no member data passing through a third party.

What it does

• Answers @mentions. A member mentions the bot account in a topic and gets a real reply, posted as a real member — notifications, search indexing and counters all behave exactly as they should.

• Learns from your community. Optional knowledge retrieval pulls the most relevant passages from elsewhere on your forum and gives them to the model before it answers, so replies cite what your community already knows instead of guessing.

• Captures bugs and suggestions. Every answered post is classified. Bug reports and feature requests land in a triage queue in your AdminCP — and, above a confidence threshold you set, are filed straight to GitHub as issues with the forum permalink attached.

• Shows you exactly what it costs. Every call is logged with token counts and real dollar cost, with a monthly budget cap that stops the assistant when it's reached.

You stay in control

• Persona and house rules. A free-text field that shapes every answer — who the assistant is, what your community is about, what it must never say, and when to escalate to a human.

• Choose your forums. Pick exactly which forums it answers in. Leave it unselected for all of them.

• Choose your model. Anthropic (Claude) or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — OpenAI, OpenRouter, Groq, Azure, or a model you host yourself.

• Never guesses out loud. The assistant is instructed to say plainly when it doesn't know, and to ask for the detail it needs rather than inventing a setting or a version number.

Knowledge retrieval, three ways

• Off — answers from the current topic alone.

• Keyword — searches your community with MySQL full-text. Needs no extra API key and works the moment you switch it on.

• Semantic — true meaning-based retrieval using Voyage AI or any OpenAI-compatible embeddings endpoint. Finds the right answer even when the member's words don't match your wording.

Semantic mode degrades gracefully: if the embeddings key is missing or the service is unreachable, it quietly falls back to keyword search rather than answering with nothing. New and edited posts are indexed automatically, and a background job builds the index for your existing content in batches.

Requirements

• Invision Community 5.0 or newer (self-hosted), with the Forums application

• An API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, or any OpenAI-compatible provider

• Optional: a Voyage AI or OpenAI embeddings key for semantic retrieval

• Optional: a GitHub token if you want bug reports filed automatically

Built to be safe

Slow model calls run in the background, so a member's post is never held up waiting for an answer, and a failed call never blocks a reply. The assistant will not answer its own posts, will not answer the same post twice, and stops entirely once your monthly budget is reached. It is upgrade-safe — it listens to Invision Community's own content events and never edits a single core file.