Integrate Help Center with AI chatbots

You connect your Help Center to an external AI chatbot through the Content API, a read-only API that lets other systems retrieve your help content programmatically. If you'd rather not run an external bot, HappyChat, HappySupport's built-in chatbot, answers from your articles on its own.

What it's for

An AI customer service chatbot only gives good answers if it has good source material. Without a connection to your Help Center, you'd have to maintain a separate knowledge base inside the chatbot and keep it in sync by hand.

The Content API solves that. Your external chatbot or retrieval system (often called a RAG system, short for retrieval-augmented generation) pulls content straight from your Help Center, so it answers from the same articles your team already maintains.

Ways to use your Help Center content with a chatbot

There are three ways to get your content into a chatbot. Which one fits depends on the bot you use.

Content API: This is the integration path for external chatbots and RAG systems. The API gives programmatic access to your Help Center content, including collection information and articles. It's read-only, so an integration can retrieve content but can't change anything in your Help Center. For how to get access and retrieve content, see "Content API Reference".

HappyChat: HappyChat is HappySupport's own AI chatbot. It indexes all your published articles automatically and answers user questions based on that content, with no API setup needed. You turn it on in "Settings" > "HappyChat", and it picks up changes within five minutes of any article publish or update. HappyChat also works with Zendesk and Intercom for escalation: when it can't answer confidently, it creates a ticket or hands off to your support tool with the full chat transcript.

Export: You can export articles as PDF or Markdown files, individually or as a ZIP. That gives you a static copy of your content, for example to upload into a tool that only accepts files. Exports don't stay in sync with your Help Center, so for an ongoing integration the Content API fits better.

What content an external chatbot can access

The Content API can return both published and internal articles.

Published articles are the ones your readers see in your Help Center. Internal articles are hidden from readers but available to AI Search and the Content API. So you can give your chatbot background knowledge (such as internal guidance your support bot should know) without publishing it on your Help Center. To learn how to set an article's publish state, see "How to publish a new article".

Draft articles aren't part of what's described as available through the Content API.

Availability

The Content API is available on the Professional plan and above. Only organization admins can create or revoke the API keys that external integrations use; other members can see the key information but not manage it.