GSoC idea: AI chatbot for Plone Docs support

Hello everyone,
I'm exploring ideas for GSoC 2025 and thought of building an AI-powered chatbot for Plone, something users can interact with to get quick answers from documentation, instead of manually browsing.

Implementation:

  • Add React based 'chatbot' component using Volto
  • Connect it to backend (plone docs using LLMs)

Is there anything similar in progress? Would this be a useful addition for the community?

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The GSOC topics are set by the GSCO mentors, not by the participants.
Don't try to change the process or change the rules.

We are currently developing a chatbot for our Plone site. However, a significant portion of the infrastructure is not directly integrated into Plone itself. We are currently testing a combination of crawl4ai, n8n, Plonerest API, and Llama. Nevertheless, we are not yet prepared to deploy this chatbot in a production environment.

See PLIP: Plone 7 Documentation Layout, Structure, Theme, and Search to Improve Usability · Issue #4097 · plone/Products.CMFPlone · GitHub where Nuclia search will be integrated with all Plone documentation, and eventually plone.org.

It has a high priority.

It's nearly complete, but work on integrating the AI chatbot part into Plone Sphinx Theme has stalled, as there just aren't enough volunteer Steve hours in the day. I'd welcome any contributions to push forward the Nuclia search part of this PLIP.