Hoobert – AI Command Bar for WooCommerce

You know the click path. Orders, filter by status, find the order, scroll, Refund, line item, quantity, amount, Refund manually, confirm. Six screens to do one small thing.

Hoobert is a command bar for that. Press Cmd/Ctrl-K anywhere in wp-admin to open the WordPress command palette, pick Ask Hoobert, and type the thing you actually wanted:

• «refund order 1042»
• «mark this order completed and add a note that the replacement shipped»
• «create a coupon SUMMER20 for 20% off»
• «add a Large / Red variation to this product at 54.99»
• «which products are out of stock»
• «who were my top customers last month»
• «approve the pending review on the espresso grinder»

Hoobert reads the request, picks the matching WooCommerce action, shows you what it is about to do, and runs it. That is the whole product. No chat thread to babysit, no second dashboard to learn, no new place your data lives.

He is an owl, and he is careful

Hoobert is meant to be trusted with a live store, so the boring parts got the most attention.

• Nothing runs until you see it. Every request is resolved into a concrete action first and previewed back to you in plain English. Anything destructive – refunds, deletions, status changes, price and stock edits – needs a confirm click before it touches your data.
• Your permissions, not the plugin’s. Actions execute in-process through WooCommerce’s own REST API v3, under your logged-in admin session. Hoobert can never do something your own account could not do.
• No keys in the browser. The inference key is stored server-side and used server-side. Your browser never holds a credential, and Hoobert never creates or uses a WooCommerce consumer key/secret pair.
• Everything is written down. Every executed command is recorded in a store-wide audit log: the request, the exact REST call, the arguments, the outcome, and who ran it.
• A fixed, small vocabulary. Hoobert ships a set of 28 defined WooCommerce actions. It cannot invent a 29th, run arbitrary code, or reach any part of your site outside that set.

How the language part works

Hoobert is powered by Fern, a family of small, fine-tuned function-calling models from Fernfly. Fern is not a general-purpose chatbot. It does exactly one job: turn a merchant sentence into one of Hoobert’s 28 WooCommerce actions with the arguments filled in. Because the job is narrow, the model is small, and small means fast.

You bring your own Fernfly project, so the connection is yours. See Connecting a model below.

What it can do

• Orders – list and search, look one up, change status, refund in full or in part, read and add order notes.
• Products – list and search, look one up, create, edit, update stock, delete.
• Variations – list and create variations on a variable product.
• Coupons – create, list, update.
• Customers – list and search, look one up, rank by lifetime spend.
• Reviews – list and moderate.
• Taxonomy – list and create product categories and tags.
• Reports – sales over a period, top sellers, top customers.

«This order» just works [coming soon]

Open an order and say «refund this». Open a product and say «drop the price to 39.99». Hoobert reads the order or product id off the screen you are on, so you rarely have to type one.

Connecting a model

Hoobert needs a Fernfly project to read requests. It takes a few minutes, and the free tier is enough to try it:

1. Create a free account at fernfly.com and start a new project. No credit card required.
2. Choose the WooCommerce template in the new project wizard for a zero-configuration flow. You could also choose the «from scratch» option and import Hoobert’s WooCommerce tool set into the project. It ships with this plugin as tools.json, in the plugin folder.
3. Train and deploy the project. Fernfly generates the training data; you do not need any ML background.
4. Copy the project’s infer URL and API key into WooCommerce -> Hoobert and save.

Until both fields are set, the command bar tells you it is not configured. Nothing is sent anywhere before then.

External service

Hoobert sends your typed request to a Fernfly inference endpoint so the model can turn it into a WooCommerce action. This is required for the plugin to function, and it is the only external service it uses.

• Service: Fernfly – fernfly.com
• When: only when you run a command from the command bar. Never on page load, on a schedule, or in the background.
• What is sent: the text you typed, and the id of the order or product on the screen you are on, so that «this order» resolves. Nothing else. No customer records, no order contents, no site credentials, no analytics, no telemetry.
• What comes back: the name of one of Hoobert’s 28 actions and its arguments. The action is then run locally, by your own site.
• Where it goes: the endpoint URL you configure. You choose the project; Hoobert has no default and ships with no key.
• Terms of service: fernfly.com/terms-of-service
• Privacy policy: fernfly.com/privacy-policy

Open source

Hoobert is GPL, all of it, including the front-end sources and the build tooling. Development happens in the open at github.com/antelligent-org/hoobert. Issues and pull requests welcome.

The owl is by agustrisana: Funny owl icons created by agustrisana – Flaticon.