What is HelpShelf?
HelpShelf is an AI support and sales agent for your product. You point it at your existing knowledge — your website, your help desk articles, or your codebase — and it answers your customers' questions in their own words, with citations back to the source.
There are three places your agent shows up:
| Surface | What it is |
|---|---|
| The widget | A launcher button on your own site. Visitors search or chat, and get grounded answers without leaving the page. |
| The help center | A public, branded knowledge base at your own URL, with search built in. |
| AI assistants | ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and coding agents can read your verified product knowledge directly. |
How it answers questions
Your agent never free-associates. Every answer is retrieved from content you own, then written up with numbered citations pointing back to the article it came from.
Retrieval combines two techniques and fuses the results:
- Keyword search catches exact matches — product names, error codes, API fields.
- Semantic search catches meaning — a visitor asking "why did my card get declined" finds your article titled "Failed payments".
If the agent can't find a confident answer, it says so and offers to hand the visitor to you rather than inventing something. See How your agent finds answers.
What you need to get started
Just one of these:
- A website. HelpShelf scans it and builds a starting knowledge base automatically.
- An existing help desk. Import your articles from Freshdesk, Zendesk, or Intercom.
- A codebase. Run
npx helpshelfand your agent learns your product from your source code.
Most people are live in under ten minutes. Start with Create your first agent.
What it is not
HelpShelf is not a ticketing system or a shared team inbox. It sits in front of whatever support tooling you already use — when a visitor needs a human, HelpShelf hands them to your existing live chat, your email, or your phone line, carrying the conversation context with them.