Everything on this page lives at Sohay → AI Settings. Work down it once and the chatbot can answer; you can revisit any of it later without losing anything.
1. Choose your AI provider
Pick OpenAI or Google (Gemini). OpenAI is the default.
Each provider’s key and model choice are stored separately, so switching between them — now or in a year — never means re-entering anything you already saved.
2. Paste the API key
Paste the key for the provider you just chose and click Save.
The field then shows a masked placeholder rather than the key. That is not a display quirk: the key is encrypted in your database and never rendered back into the admin, so there is nothing to read even with the page source open.
Saving a key for a provider you have not selected is fine. It sits there unused, and it is what makes switching back instant.
3. Pick a model
The dropdown lists the models Sohay will call for the provider you chose.
The defaults — gpt-4o-mini for OpenAI, gemini-2.5-flash for Google — are
the cheap, fast ones, and they are the right starting point. Move up a tier
only if you can point at answers that were not good enough.
4. Set a daily spend cap
Under Spend protection, set a Daily site token cap. Once the day’s usage passes it, Sohay stops calling your provider until the ceiling resets at UTC midnight.
Set this before you go live, not after. It is the difference between a
runaway loop or a hostile bot costing you a few dollars and costing you a
weekend’s worth of tokens. Setting it to 0 disables the ceiling, which is
worth doing deliberately rather than by leaving it blank.
5. Optional — write a welcome message
The Welcome Message field (up to 280 characters) is what greets a visitor when they open the chat. A specific one does real work: “Ask me about shipping, returns, or any product” gets better questions than an empty box does.
What you have not done yet
The chatbot can now talk, but it has nothing of yours to talk about. That is the next article: Publish your first article and sync it.
