Ferndesk
Assistant

How to enable AI assistant answers

You can enable AI-powered answers in two locations: your help center and your embedded widget. Both use your knowledge base to answer customer questions, but can be enabled independently.

Before you begin

Make sure you have:

  • Admin or editor role in your Ferndesk account

For best results, publish at least one article in your knowledge base before enabling AI answers.

An empty knowledge base will cause the AI to respond with "I couldn't find information" for most queries. Publish core content before enabling.

Enable AI answers in your help center

  1. Navigate to Help Center → Customize in your dashboard

  2. Find the AI Answers section in the customization sidebar

  3. Toggle Enable AI answers to ON

  4. Preview the sparkles icon in the help center header

  5. Click Save to apply your changes

Use the preview panel to see how the AI sparkles icon and panel appear before saving changes.

Enable AI answers in your widget

  1. Navigate to Help Center → Widget in your dashboard

  2. Click Customize to open the customization panel

  3. Find the AI Answers section in the sidebar

  4. Toggle Enable AI answers to ON

  5. Click Save changes at the top of the panel

Make sure you've embedded the widget on your site before enabling AI features.

Using both together

You can enable AI answers in both your help center and widget to provide a consistent self-service experience across all touchpoints. Each can be enabled or disabled independently.

Configure how answers sound

Enabling AI answers controls whether the assistant responds. How it responds is configured separately in Settings → AI Assistant: tone, answer length, emoji, screenshot use, standing instructions, and off-limits topics.

That one configuration applies to both the help center and the widget, so you set it once. It also affects the public MCP ask_assistant flow when MCP is enabled.

For every option, default, and limit, see Customize the AI assistant. To let readers ask your help center questions from AI tools like ChatGPT, see Let readers use your help center in AI tools.

Was this helpful?
Was this helpful?