Sohay — AI Chatbot for Knowledge Base and WooCommerce

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.

On a WooCommerce store, the chatbot shops with your visitors. It searches your catalog, pulls up a product with its size and colour options, reads live stock and prices, answers shipping, returns, and refund questions from your store’s own pages, and adds, changes, or removes items in the shopper’s cart — without them leaving the conversation. Every cart change comes with an Undo button, and every price and stock status is read from your store rather than invented. On sites without WooCommerce, none of it appears.

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.
• Sells, not just supports — on a WooCommerce store the chatbot searches your catalog, checks stock and prices, and fills the shopper’s cart inside the conversation. Declares HPOS and Cart-Checkout-Blocks compatibility. On sites without WooCommerce the shopping tools stay hidden and everything else works the same.
• No coding to set up — paste an OpenAI or Google Gemini 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 token cap and the plugin stops calling your AI provider 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.

What’s included

• A chat widget that drops into every page (you can hide it on pages you don’t want it on).
• WooCommerce shopping tools (WooCommerce 7.0 or later) — catalog search and browse, product and variant lookup, live stock and prices, shipping/returns/refund answers, and add, change, or remove in the shopper’s cart. Each result renders as a card in the chat rather than a wall of text.
• 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 AI provider and model, writing the welcome message, and setting daily spend caps.
• A Diagnostics screen that shows today’s 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 API keys are encrypted in the database and never shown in the admin UI after you save them.

You’ll need

• A WordPress site running version 6.6 or later, on PHP 8.1 or later.
• An account and API key with OpenAI or Google (Gemini). You pay that provider directly for the model usage — Sohay does not resell access. A typical small support site stays in single-digit dollars per month. If you use the Knowledge Base, you need an OpenAI key regardless of which provider answers the chat — see External services.
• Optional — WooCommerce 7.0 or later, if you want the shopping tools. Everything else works without it.

External services

Sohay sends data to an AI provider to generate chat answers, and to OpenAI to index and search your Knowledge Base. Without an account and API key for at least one provider, the plugin has no upstream model to call and the chat widget cannot answer questions.

Which service receives your visitors’ messages depends on the provider you select under Sohay → AI Settings:

• OpenAI (https://openai.com) — the default.
• Google (Gemini) (https://ai.google.dev) — optional alternative.

Knowledge Base indexing and search always go to OpenAI, whichever provider answers the chat. If you select Google and switch the Knowledge Base on, keep an OpenAI key saved as well; without one the chatbot answers without consulting your articles.

What is sent, and when

• When a visitor sends a chat message — the message text and recent conversation history are forwarded over HTTPS to the selected provider and processed by the model configured under Sohay → AI Settings. That is https://api.openai.com/v1/responses for OpenAI, or https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/models/*:streamGenerateContent for Google.
• 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. This happens on OpenAI regardless of which provider answers the chat.
• When the chatbot looks something up in your Knowledge Base — the visitor’s question is sent to https://api.openai.com/v1/vector_stores/*/search to find matching articles, and the matched article text is then sent on to whichever provider is generating the reply.
• On a WooCommerce store, when the chatbot uses a shopping tool — the answer it looks up is sent back to the model so it can reply, in the same conversation as the message that prompted it. Depending on the tool, that is: product names, descriptions, prices, sale prices, stock status, categories, tags, option names and values (size, colour), product page and image URLs; the text of the store pages you have set as Terms, Privacy, Refunds and Returns, plus any Knowledge Base articles matched to a shipping, returns or refund question; and the contents of the shopper’s cart — the items in it, their quantities and options, and the cart totals. This happens only on stores running WooCommerce, and only for the tools the chatbot actually calls in that conversation.

What is not sent. The cart data describes the basket, not the shopper: no name, email address, postal address, phone number, or payment details are included. Sohay never sends order history, customer records, or anything from WooCommerce’s checkout to your AI provider, because none of the shopping tools read them.

Where it goes

All requests go over HTTPS to api.openai.com and, if you select Google, generativelanguage.googleapis.com. 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 keys are handled

The API key you enter for a provider under AI Settings authenticates that provider’s requests. Keys are 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. A key is only ever sent to the service it belongs to. Saving a key for a provider you have not selected stores it but does not use it — that is what lets you switch back without re-entering it.

Your responsibilities

Before activating the plugin, please review the terms of the provider you select — OpenAI’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, and if you use Gemini, Google’s Gemini API Additional Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Note that Google applies different data-handling terms to free-tier and paid API keys; read the terms for the tier you are on. Because Knowledge Base indexing runs on OpenAI either way, a site with the Knowledge Base switched on shares data with OpenAI even when Gemini answers the chat. Site owners are responsible for obtaining the appropriate legal basis (consent, contract, legitimate interest, etc.) to share visitor messages with these services under GDPR, CCPA, and other applicable privacy regimes in the jurisdictions they operate in. On a WooCommerce store that basis needs to cover the shopping tools too — what a visitor has put in their cart is information about that visitor, even though no name or address is attached to it. If you would rather it never left your site, the shopping tools can be switched off individually in code; see the FAQ below.

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.

On a WooCommerce store, the chatbot’s shopping tools read your catalog, your policy pages, and the visitor’s own cart. What they find is sent to your AI provider so the model can answer, and it is also saved with the conversation — that is what lets the product card or cart summary still be there when the visitor scrolls back. So a stored conversation on a WooCommerce store can contain a snapshot of what that visitor had in their cart at the time. It is covered by the same export, erase and retention paths as the rest of the conversation: erasing the chat erases the snapshot with it. No customer name, address, or payment detail is involved — see External services for the exact list.

See the External services section above for what gets sent, and to which service.