[Plugin] Grav AI Chatbot - RAG-Powered AI & Local Zero-Cost FAQ Assistant

Hi everyone!

I’d like to introduce a new plugin I’ve been developing for Grav CMS: Grav AI Chatbot (grav-plugin-ai-chatbot). 100% FREE AND OPEN SOURCE.

📦 Where to Download / Repo

• GitHub Repository: https://github.com/milkboyinchina/grav-ai-chatbot

• Live Demo: Test the floating chatbot live on https://www.milkboy.my.id (No CDN, may be slow if you are not in the same region as me)

  Hardware Warning for Live Demo:
  The live demo backend on milkboy.my.id is powered by a custom remote Ollama endpoint running on a janky old Intel Celeron N4100 low-power mini PC serving Qwen2.5-0.8B! It proves the RAG engine's extreme token efficiency by running on ultra-weak hardware, but your mileage may vary—please expect slight processing latency when testing live queries! 😉

❓ What is it & What is it for?

It’s a customizable AI Chatbot widget for Grav sites designed to deliver instant, factual answers to visitors while keeping your AI API token costs close to $0.00.

✨ Key Features:

• 🧠 Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Uses a local SQLite vector database to inject only relevant section chunks into AI prompts, achieving an 80%+ token & cost reduction.
• ⚡ Multi-Provider AI Support: Works with Google Gemini (Default Free Tier), Groq (Ultra-fast Llama 3), OpenAI, OpenRouter, or local self-hosted Ollama models.
• 🎨 Custom UI Themes & Quick Replies: Includes preset themes (Glassmorphic Blue, Emerald Dark, etc.), custom accent colors, position controls, and quick reply suggestion pills.
• 📅 Date Range Analytics & Data Export: Visual interaction volume bar charts, query distribution ratios, and CSV/JSON export endpoints.
• 🛡️ Safety Guardrails & Limits: Built-in rate limiting and blacklisted vocabulary filtering.

💡 Use it WITH or WITHOUT Paid AI:

• WITHOUT AI (100% Free / Zero API Calls): Enable Local Semantic FAQ Pre-Matching and the Local TF-IDF/BM25 engine. Visitor questions are matched locally against your /faq pages with 0 AI API tokens used.
• WITH AI: Enable cloud AI fallback (Google Gemini, Groq, OpenAI) or local/remote self-hosted Ollama (tested on Qwen2.5-0.8B, nomic-embed-text) for natural language answers.

⚙️ Known Issues Being Worked On:

• Live error logs display & inline chart metric updates on the Grav Admin config page not updating (still have not figure this out yet, might give up and ask for help soon).

🙏 Request for Testing & Feedback:

Please test it out on your Grav setups and let me know your thoughts!

• Does the RAG indexing work smoothly on your pages and themes?
• Is it polished enough for official GPM (Grav Package Manager) submission?

Looking forward to your feedback and bug reports on GitHub! Thanks!

Star this project on GitHub too!

Reserving Second post (might add some thing), while ranting.

Why i made this? coming from old school chatbot (rasa) was a pain in the @$$. i want some chatbot function for my grav but, most do not fit my need and expensive for a personal site. so i made this. chatbot are helpful for lazy visitor and customer, help with improving user retention, for that crappy ads revenue