Growing up, my weekends weren’t spent at the mall or hanging out with friends like most high schoolers my age. I was trapped in my parents' store, surrounded by boxes, shelves, and countless products awaiting inventory. My job? Take photos of products, upload them to the website, and write descriptions that somehow convinced people to buy yet another brand of phone case or random kitchen gadget. It was tedious work—the same routine over and over. I felt like a robot, except the real robots weren’t around to help.

Between balancing schoolwork and the constant cycle of restocking and updating the online store, I was burnt out. The worst part wasn’t even restocking itself; it was the endless product uploads and descriptions. By Saturday afternoon, after hours of taking and editing product images, I couldn’t tell the difference between a toaster and a blender. Describing them? Even worse.

I finally decided there had to be a better way. I remembered reading about AI tools that could do things like generate text and images. That’s when I found Coze.com—a no-code platform that allows anyone to create an AI chatbot using natural language to prompt its system. It was like a light bulb flickered in my head. What if I could build a chatbot to handle all the boring stuff?

This could help me save time I spent taking product images, manually researching, and tying in product details into our website.

Well, this I did and will show you how. Below is an outline of what I’ll discuss on how I implemented its tools in building my AI chatbot

• What is Coze?
• How it works
• Writing Prompts
• Implementing Plugins
• Variables
• Database
• Outcome
• Benefits of using my AI chatbot
• Personal thoughts about Coze

What’s Coze?

In short, Coze is a no-code tool platform for building simple to complex AI chatbots in minutes. It allows users to easily create a wide range of bots using text. The chatbots can be published in its in-app store, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, and a whole other bunch of social media.

How It Works

To create your own chatbot, simply

1. Sign up on the platform.
2. Create an agent bot in your workspace.
3. Fill in all the required information on the pop-up screen.
4. Begin prompting.

Prompts

When customers ask or search for an item on our website, they expect to see a detailed description of it. They want to have information on what they are buying, its quality, specifications, and what makes it stand out. To provide this, I have to instruct the system on the input data it should get, and output information it should return, and in what structure. To do this, I utilize the prompt feature.

A prompt is a natural language instruction that tells an AI system what to do, and Coze uses this to make it easy for anyone to describe what they intend to build.

These instructions are entered into the system under personas and prompts. In my case, I wanted my bot to take the name of a product and provide me with a detailed description and specifications of it.

I noticed there are two types of prompting while building.

Agent prompt, which tells the chatbot what to build, how to build it, and results to return to users.

End user prompt, which queries the built chatbot to return desired results

Coze allows for the optimization of initially written prompts so it can return the best results in a well-structured manner, including a well-detailed skill set my chatbot should have.

Plugins

As the saying goes, pictures speak louder than words, and what better way to reinforce the item specifications than giving customers an image of the item they searched for and intend to buy? They don’t just get to read about what the products are made of or can do but get a visual representation of every detail. To add this level of detail to my chatbot, plugins came into play.

Plugins are what make most Coze bots run faster and more effectively, delivering the best results, much like how my parent’s store utilizes the services of established delivery companies to send out paid items to customers.

They are additional software components that extend the functionality of an application. Plugins provide specialized features and capabilities that the base application, in this case, my AI chatbot, does not have. To enhance my chatbot, I made use of two plugins: Stable Diffusion and Gemini AI.

Gemini AI provided my chatbot with information on inputted product items. It takes the name of the product from the user prompt, searches through its large knowledge base, and returns a response.

A stable diffusion plugin makes it easy to generate high-quality product images.

Database

Much like how we have a warehouse for storage and retrieval of items. I needed to be able to store the product information generated for easy reference and retrieval instead of having to prompt the system every time I needed the same information.

Databases are used to store information to be retrieved at a later time. For my chatbot, I created a database by specifying the table name, name of fields, type of data to be collected, and if it required information.

Since Coze is a no-code tool, I can easily type in this field name, and it would be created as an SQL database.

To record data in the database, I simply specified a new skill in the prompt and persona section, referencing the database table name and its fields. Also, I enabled a file box that, in Coze, holds large files, such as images, to store the product images. This would come in handy when I needed to download the images to use on my parent’s online store. Check out Skill 3 in the image below.

Outcome

In the preview panel, I tested my newly created chatbot and got the following results as shown in the image below. My chatbot generated a response when queried with a product name and image and stored the result in its database for easy retrieval when needed or the chat has been cleared.

Benefits of Using My AI Chatbot

By the time I had it fully functional, everything changed. Instead of spending hours with a camera taking product pictures and trying to give a description of the product based on my knowledge, I’d simply input the product name, and my AI chatbot would take care of the rest. It even handled multiple product variations.

The best part is it helped cut down our marketing and advertising costs because the AI-generated images were good enough to post right away on social media and campaign boards.

We didn’t have to spend huge amounts hiring a professional photographer to take product images for the store when we needed to run a sales campaign.

Now, what used to take me an entire weekend only took a couple of hours.

Personal Thoughts

After building my chatbot utilizing Coze, here are my personal thoughts about it.

• Coze makes complicated AI chatbots look easy. Before them, you had to be an experienced developer to build out an AI product, but with Coze, a novice can get started easily with zero level of expertise. Making AI chatbot development more accessible.

• Launching your chatbot on its platform or another platform, such as WhatsApp, is simple with guides to help individuals achieve this. This makes using my developed chatbot on my favorite platform without hassle.

• Sometimes, it feels the plugins are limited but Coze allows for the development of plugins to be added to its library. Anyone can design a plugin and publish it on the Coze store. This alone allows for a more robust platform and tools.

• Coze's emphasis on using real-time data and personalization enables the creation of more tailored and effective AI chatbots. This improves user experiences and drives engagement with businesses and services.

• Coze encourages experimentation and innovation in AI chatbot development. This leads to the creation of new and exciting chatbot applications which addresses a variety of needs.