Ask AI powered by Finalsite Intelligence overview

Ask AI is an intelligent website assistant for K-12 schools powered by Finalsite Intelligence that answers visitor questions in real time using content from your Help Center. It provides conversational responses sourced directly from your school's published articles and pages, available 24/7 without requiring staff intervention.

Ask AI is an intelligent website assistant designed for K–12 independent school and district websites around the world. Unlike traditional rule-based systems, Ask AI delivers dynamic, thoughtful, and helpful interactions by being adaptive, context-aware, and user-focused. Designed to support families, it provides quick and accurate answers without the need to search, click, or sift through pages of information—making it far more than just your ordinary chatbot.

In this article

• Ask AI features
• How it works
  • Customize how Ask AI looks and feels
  • Manage what Ask AI knows
• Managing your Ask AI feature
• Home screen tour
  • Main panel
  • Left-navigation tabs
• Maximizing value

Ask AI features

Here are some of the things that Ask AI can do to support you and your district or school community:

• Provide 24/7 intelligent support and school-specific FAQ responses to improve accessibility and engagement.
• Offer multilingual voice and text communication in 70+ languages to connect with diverse families.
• Integrate real-time content updates and a dynamic knowledge base to keep information current and relevant.
• Continuously updated through curated knowledge base expansions. Content is refined and extended over time through thoughtful updates to maintain accuracy and relevance.
• Align appearance, tone, and functionality with your school’s brand identity to build trust and continuity.
• Equip staff with a reporting dashboard for insights into top questions, engagement trends, and information gaps

How it works

Customize how Ask AI looks and feels

• Customize your Ask AI widget’s appearance to align with your brand, including tone of voice, color scheme, font, and avatar.
• Preview visual updates in real time to ensure a cohesive user experience.
• Control widget placement on your site by adjusting position, bottom margin, and z-index layering.
• Personalize the welcome message and add up to six predefined questions to spark engagement and generate dynamic, real-time answers.

Manage what Ask AI knows

To get started, your implementation team will walk alongside you in populating your knowledge base through Website scans and File imports:

Website scans

• Set up your knowledge source by naming it and entering the URL to be indexed. Exclude specific pages by exact URL to keep internal or outdated content out of scope.
• Choose your indexing strategy by either scanning all subdomains, targeting a specific URL prefix, or focusing on a single high-priority page.
• Customize how often the tool checks for new content to keep your knowledge base up to date.

File imports

• Expand your personalized knowledge base by uploading files in the Knowledge tab.
  • Supported file upload types: CSV, PDF, DOCX, TXT.
• Newly-uploaded content becomes instantly searchable when users ask questions.
• Ask AI uses this new information—alongside existing sources—to generate more relevant, accurate responses.

Learn more about adding content to your personalized knowledge base in the article, "Ask AI Manage: Configuring settings and knowledge base" > in the section, "Knowledge tab." 

Once you are all set, your new customized feature will appear on your website ready to engage with site visitors.

Managing your Ask AI feature 

The Ask AI Home screen is where you will configure your settings and manage your features on an ongoing basis. 

Home screen tour

Here’s a quick walkthrough of the Ask AI Home screen.

Main panel

• Summary for all Chatbots: Organization admins with more than one instance of Ask AI can view aggregated statistics across all instances within their district or multi-school setup. These metrics reflect the total activity and performance for the selected date range.
  • Clients with a single instance of Ask AI will see the same homepage minus the summary bar across the top.
• Performance overview: Review real-time analytics to evaluate Ask AI's performance, including session volume, number of questions submitted, and user feedback ratings for the selected instance.

Left-navigation tabs

• Home: Return to the dashboard at any time.
• Analytics: Monitor user sentiment via the Feedback page and identify trending topics with the Categories report to continuously improve your AI’s accuracy.
• Chat logs: View all AI interactions using searchable, filterable entries by date or keyword. Each allows you to view the full conversation and includes a timestamp, user query, and AI response.
• Appearance: Select from your options to customize how your Ask AI looks and behaves.
  • Personalize Ask AI: Tailor Ask AI’s personality and appearance to align with your brand. Choose from preset tone of voice options—Friendly & Warm, Professional & Polite, or Concise & Direct. Customize fonts and reply colors, select an avatar and its color, and assign a name that reflects your organization’s identity.
  • Change the position: Configure where Ask AI will display on your website.
  • Conversation: Set the Welcome text, and add predefined questions to appear as bubble-style call-to-action (CTA) prompts within the Ask AI widget, offering users a quick way to engage. These prompts represent commonly asked or encouraged questions, allowing users to input them with a single click rather than typing. The AI then generates a real-time response based on the most current knowledge base—ensuring relevance even as website content evolves.
  • Preview: Instantly view changes with a live preview, allowing you to fine-tune the widget’s design in real time.
• Knowledge: Here is where you'll connect all content to your Ask AI assistant’s personalized knowledge base, the central source that powers its conversations with site visitors. You can even set Fallback replies so that unanswered questions are routed to a designated contact. 
• Test & Launch: This tab is where you can find the necessary code to embed the Ask AI widget onto your website.
• User Management: In this area, you can assign user roles and configure permissions for your roles. Learn more in the article, "Ask AI permissions."

To learn more about how you can configure and manage Ask AI, check out the full details in the article "Ask AI Manage: Configuring settings and knowledge base."

Maximizing value

Before getting started, consider these strategies to maximize the impact of your Ask AI assistant. Effective implementation and continuous optimization are key to unlocking its full value:

• Gather visitor feedback: Regularly prompt users to rate Ask AI's usefulness and provide suggestions for improvement.
• Monitor engagement metrics: Track usage patterns, common questions, and unresolved inquiries through Ask AI’s dashboard.
• Refine responses over time: Use data insights to improve accuracy, add missing information, and adapt to evolving community needs.
• Promote accessibility: Highlight multilingual support and ensure Ask AI is easy to find on both desktop and mobile.
• Educate staff and families: Provide training or tutorials to help users understand how to interact with Ask AI effectively.
• Personalize branding: Customize its name, colors, and tone to make it feel like a natural extension of the school’s communication system.