dAi – an AI chatbot for your own TYPO3 pages
Free, open source and without data migration: your visitors ask, your content answers
dAi is a TYPO3 extension that turns your page tree into a knowledge base. Visitors ask their question in their own words and receive an answer from your content – with source references, around the clock, in the language of the question.
No moving content, no second maintenance effort: dAi reads the pages directly from the TYPO3 page tree – without a sitemap, without a crawler. Whatever you maintain in TYPO3 is known to the chatbot.
dAi is licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later and is the free community version of dAi Pro.
What dAi can do
- TYPO3 pages as a data source. Select root pages, depth and language, synchronise – done. dAi reads the pages directly from the page tree.
- Four providers to choose from. Mistral, OpenAI, Google Gemini and Anthropic (Claude). You select the chat model and embedding model separately per collection.
- RAG and CAG. Semantic vector search for large bodies of content, the complete knowledge base in the prompt cache for compact ones – a classifier decides for each question.
- Answers with sources. The chatbot answers exclusively from the knowledge base and names the pages on which the answer is found.
- Multilingual. Languages per collection, language-separated knowledge bundles, translatable prompts and help texts.
- Document-by-document control. Each imported page can be activated or excluded individually – you can see at any time what the AI knows.
- Usage at a glance. Tokens and costs per collection, logged and exportable.
What this looks like on the frontend
You place the dAi: Chatbot (AI search) content element on any page you like. The answer appears in the stream – word by word, as you know it from chat interfaces – and below it the sources it originates from.
What you need
- TYPO3 12.4, 13.4 or 14 with PHP 8.2 or newer.
- PostgreSQL with the
pgvectorextension for the vector index. The remaining TYPO3 tables may continue to reside on MySQL or MariaDB. - An API key with Mistral, OpenAI, Google Gemini or Anthropic.
- Composer. dAi has four runtime dependencies and is therefore installed via Composer, not by ZIP from the Extension Manager.
You settle the costs for the AI responses directly with your provider – dAi itself is free and logs every call so that you keep an eye on expenditure.
All further steps – database, key, first collection, integrating the chatbot – are described in the handbook.
dAi or dAi Pro?
The free version covers the most common case: your TYPO3 content becomes queryable
If your own page tree is sufficient as a knowledge source, dAi fully meets your needs. dAi Pro begins where the knowledge lies elsewhere or more control is required:
- Additional data sources. Website crawling, file uploads (PDF, Office) and connectors to Confluence, Notion, Zendesk, Nextcloud, SharePoint, databases and more.
- Assistants. Appearance, knowledge scope and response behaviour per use case – with example answers and objectives.
- External functions and handover. The assistant can trigger defined actions and pass specialist questions to a suitable specialist collection.
- Voice chat, figure recognition from PDFs, user management and a REST API for your own interfaces.
Questions and answers
- Does dAi really cost nothing?
The extension itself is free and open source (GPL-2.0-or-later). Costs arise only with the AI provider of your choice, with whom you settle directly. dAi logs every call with tokens and costs, so that you can see the expenditure per collection.
- Do I need to copy my content somewhere?
No. dAi reads the pages from your TYPO3 page tree and builds a search index from them. You continue to maintain content exactly as before; changed pages are reprocessed at the next synchronisation.
- Why PostgreSQL, when my TYPO3 runs on MySQL?
For semantic search, dAi requires a vector index, which is provided by the PostgreSQL extension
pgvector. Only the knowledge base is stored there – your TYPO3 installation can remain unchanged on MySQL or MariaDB. Both databases run alongside each other without any problems.- Which language model should I choose?
Our recommendation when European hosting and GDPR are the priority: Mistral. However, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google Gemini are also possible. You can choose a different model per collection and switch at any time – your content remains unaffected, only the vector index is rebuilt when you switch the embedding model.
- Does the chatbot invent answers?
It is set to answer exclusively from the knowledge base and states openly when information is missing. The sources are named for every answer, so your visitors can check them.
- Does dAi also run on TYPO3 12?
Yes. dAi is released for TYPO3 12.4, 13.4 and 14 and has been tested on all three versions.
Help with setup and operation
dAi is built so that you can set it up yourself – the manual guides you through it step by step. If you would rather have someone at your side who does this every day: we set up dAi in your project, get the database running and tune the prompts and knowledge scope to your content.