443 – AI Experiments in WordPress: a plugin search engine, customer support bots, and Block Editor integration

[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 443, entitled AI Experiments in WordPress, a plugin search engine, customer support bot, and block editor integration. It was published on Thursday, the 30th of October, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and we will get into our conversation a little bit later. Before that, a few bits of housekeeping.

The main thing that's going on these days in the WordPress space is Black Friday. If you are curious about what things are available in the run up to Black Friday, we have a page where we are curating a whole bunch of things. Currently, there's about 125 different deals on that page. You can find out what dates they start, what dates they end, and the percentage off that you are going to receive. I suggest that you bookmark that page. It's dead easy, wpbuilds.com/black. Once more, wp builds.com/black. Go there and in the run up to Black Friday, you will see all of the deals as they occur. We usually have about 400 deals on there, which pretty much encapsulates all of the deals in the WordPress space.

And if you are a product owner, you can add your deal for free. If you scroll down a little bit, there's an add a deal button. Click that, fill out the form, and if you have a WordPress product or something in the WordPress space, we will make sure that it gets on that page.

If you would like to really boost your ratings as a product or service owner, why not take out some sponsorship for that page? There are some little cards at the top. You can see, for example, that WS Form have taken us up on this. It will get you pride of place in the run up to Black Friday, which as you will know, is a very busy time. wpbuilds.com/black.

If you'd like to advertise on this podcast more generally, and you're gonna hear from a few companies that do just that in a moment, head to wp builds.com/advertise to find out more.

The WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by GoDaddy Pro. GoDaddy Pro, the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpbuilds.

We're also helped out by Bluehost. Bluehost, redefine your web hosting experience with Bluehost Cloud. Managed WordPress hosting that comes with lightning fast websites, 100% network uptime, and 24 7 priority support. With Bluehost Cloud, the possibilities are outta this world. Experience it today bluehost.com/cloud.

And we're also joined by Omnisend. Omnisend, do you sell your stuff online? Then meet Omnisend. Yes, that Omnisend. The email and SMS tool that helps you make 73 bucks for every dollar spent. The one that's so good, it's almost boring. Hate the excitement of rollercoaster sales? Prefer a steady line going up? Try Omnisend today at omnisend.com.

And thanks go to Bluehost, GoDaddy Pro, and Omnisend for their continuing support of the WP Builds Podcast. Remember, if you'd like to join them, wpbuilds.com/advertise.

Right. What have we got for you today? Well, it's a really interesting episode. I am talking to Amadeu Arderiu. He's a developer based in Spain, and over the last period of time, they've been really getting into AI based products.

We talk about three things today. One, which is a plugin marketplace where you can search with ai, not just like.org, the free plugins, but also premium plugins as well. That's interesting.

We also talk about a chat interface, which will enable people who visit your website to be able to ask questions about the content of your website.

And then towards the end we get into a product that they are working on, which enables you to build by prompting inside of the Gutenberg editor interface.

It's really interesting. They really are pushing the boundaries of AI, and I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast by Amadeu Arderiu. Did I get that right?

[00:04:43] Amadeu Arderiu: It was almost perfect.

[00:04:46] Nathan Wrigley: Can I go with almost perfect? Is that okay? I had a few before we began, and that probably is good as it's gonna get. I'm really intrigued by this episode. we're gonna talk about a whole bunch of stuff. I think it's quite likely, dear listener, that there's gonna be one or two bits and pieces in here that you will not have heard of before.

And some of them, especially the one that kind of reminds me of, It's like AI injected into your Gutenberg interface is particularly interesting. I'm new to a lot of it as well, so I'm gonna be exploring with you. So before we begin, would you just mind introducing yourself? I don't mean anything particularly long, just a quick bio, who you are and how you've ended up dealing with and so on.

[00:05:27] Amadeu Arderiu: I am an industrial engineer from Barcelona, Spain, and i have two partners, So we are three in our company that, its name is CVE that we started almost 10 years ago. And since then we've been like developing custom plugins for other customers and recently. two years ago we started developing some, let's say, AI experiments in the WordPress ecosystem, and i, think that's a good introduction

[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That will do. Yeah. That's really nice. I will say, dear listener, again, if there's anything in this episode that you're not sure about, just just go to wp builds.com. search for this episode. I'm not entirely sure what the number of this episode will be just yet, but just search for this episode.

And in the show notes, we'll be links to. All of the different bits and pieces that we're gonna tackle, we are gonna try to get through three different things. and I'll just say what they are, one at a time. So the, first one that we're gonna explore, this is really cool. I've gotta say this is what we all need.

I think to some extent it's called P plugins and the spelling, is maybe not what you think. It's PLOO, so double O-G-I-N-S. And you can add.com to that. So plugins double o.com and It's almost like the, repository for WordPress for plugins only. There's a few little twists and turns, which make it a bit different.

Do you wanna describe how this would be different than going to wordpress.org? 'cause there's quite a bit to unpack here.

[00:07:01] Amadeu Arderiu: Yes. I think the easiest way to explain it is like using Google for searching plug-ins. Nowadays in Google, you use almost natural language. you are not really using like really keyword based, searches anymore. Do you remember back in that time when we used to quote things, use pluses and minus within the query?

So it's more than that, like really similar to Google.

So just to, say it differently. It's, a self changing that understands lateral language and converts natural language to plugin intentions or plug-in features or plugin needs for, from this query. And, gives you plug-ins that hopefully, solves, that problem that you are writing.

[00:07:58] Nathan Wrigley: So the idea is that you go to, p plugins.com. I'm actually looking at a results page at the moment, so I'm quickly gonna eradicate that and get back to the sort of main domain. So you go to plugins.com and you're presented with basically a blue screen with what you'd expect from Google back in the day.

There's one text field, really, and instead of it being a very short query, you can write in your own natural language. And so you could make that a full sentence or a. Paragraph full of sentences. And the idea being is that you ask plugins which plugin would be the best match for the set of criteria that you've got?

Oh, I don't know. You need a form plugin, which has the capacity to upload, images on the front end and, then plugins will go off. And I presume you are connecting to some. API endpoint of a, of some AI agent out there. You wait a moment or two, AI is not as quick as Google would be.

It has to do a little bit thinking, but you type in and then you get a bunch of search results back. So my first question is, I'm using English 'cause that's the only language that I speak. how applicable would this be across all languages? for example, if I speak Japanese or French or whatever it may be, how does, am I okay to use it with those.

[00:09:14] Amadeu Arderiu: It may give you different results because in the Wordpress Directory plugins are sometimes also written in, other languages. the native, or let's say the primary, source of the plugin, also the title, but it will work for, let's say the majority of languages, out of the box without anything else to.

To do. The thing is the plugin, the website, sorry, is in English. So even if you search with Spanish, let's say you will get, the plugins in the English, version. But yes, it works with all languages because AI, as we know is, is designed to understand any language at the, at this

[00:10:02] Nathan Wrigley: That's so curious though, that you can just begin typing in any language and it'll just figure it out for you. That is remarkable. So I'll give you a quick idea. I wrote one sentence. And the sentence that I wrote was, a plugin, so in quotes, a plugin which offers the ability to customize the WooCommerce checkout page.

I thought that was a kind of query that maybe a bunch of people might want to do. That could have been much longer. I could have been much more specific, but that was the, thing that I wrote and I, pressed return and I waited maybe, 10 seconds, something around that. Length of time, and I got 19 search results back, and I, won't tell you what they are, but they're the ones that I expected being in the WordPress space and obs obsessing about WordPress.

These were the ones that I would have expected to come back. Now what's curious though, is the way that you surface these, so as an example, you'll give the, title. You have a link to the plugin page, you've got a link to the playground page, all like.org would have at the moment. You say how many installs there are, you say when it was last updated, the star rating, and so on and so forth.

Now, so at the moment the user may be thinking, how's that different to.org? And I guess the secret source here, the bit that makes it really interesting to me is that you don't just limit yourself to free things off the repository. You are also open to. Paid plugins, so pro versions of plugins as well.

And if that's the case, how do you know that they exist? Because presumably you don't spend hours of your evening, every evening going out looking for these plugins to be, to add, is there some backwards and forwards that you have with developers where they can fill up the plugins database with this?

[00:11:43] Amadeu Arderiu: Yes, we ask, developers to submit their plug-ins in the platform. When we started two years ago, there, there wasn't, there, there weren't plugin, premium plug-ins sorry. And progressively we started to add them by asking companies and, individuals, developers, do you want your plug-ins to be in plug-ins.

and.

The website, has a banner that if you are a premium or a plugin developer, you can submit them. It's free. We will ask some questions like, content questions like we want, we need content from the plugin, and we will, index it in our database. So yes, plug-ins gives you both community and premium plugins.

for the queries. They have challenge here for ourselves and for any, anyone who tried to build a search solution would understand with me, would, would understand is how to rank things or how to order them. Because we are, at the moment cloud, we are mixing things, we are mixing community planes.

We have some. Data from them, but I dunno how many active installations this specific premium plugin has, so we have to be creative and to find a way to to, to adapt these formulas, of ranking formulas, let's say, for, the project.

It's like a challenge, it was a challenge at the moment, yes, it

[00:13:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And if you think about it, it's a challenge that Google have been trying to crack for the last 20 years and still tweaking their algorithm.

[00:13:26] Amadeu Arderiu: Yes.

[00:13:28] Nathan Wrigley: it's never gonna come to an end, this one. But really curious. So I, what I put in, The query that I put in, I, don't know if some of those are premium.

I, I suspect just looking through them, it feels to me as if the ones that I've got all 19 of the results that I've got may be ones that are available on the.org page. 'cause they've all got on like an playground link. I dunno if that's something that you get off the.org page, but there's also faceted search as well.

So for example, I can check a box and say, give me. The, ones that will work only on the latest version of WordPress. So whatever the current state of WordPress is at the moment, then I can choose to filter out, or rather in, the amount of updates it's had. So by that has it been updated in the last month?

Check that box, and only recently updated ones will appear. And there's four different options of different times than popularity. Which I guess is some kind of measure of success and quality to some people. 1 million and above, and then 500,000 and right down to, 1000 and below. And then star rating again, I presume, is coming out of the the.org repo.

You've got the ability to like things and what have you. Do you have the capacity for me to log in and keep a record of the bits and pieces that I've liked? example, if I do a thumbs up, can I come back to that, like a bookmarked thing in the future?

[00:14:52] Amadeu Arderiu: not, this one, but the first thing that you said. you can log in, you can register. And any search that you do while locked in would be saved and you would, in a really simple dashboard that you will be able to access through the top right corner of the webpage, you will see your searches

[00:15:17] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so you're gonna keep a track different searches that I applied. Got it, So I, guess I have a fairly obvious question. Thi this is quite a lot of work. Presumably the more popular it gets, the more money is draining out of your pocket because you're doing AI searches and connecting to some API somewhere.

how do you, keep this thing going, and what's the plan for growth? do you intend to monetize it in some way, or are you gonna keep it this philanthropic thing? What's the plan?

[00:15:50] Amadeu Arderiu: let's, let me say that nowadays this project is not giving us, any income revenue. Okay? let me say that this project was, and it still is, but really at the beginning it was really about branding and awareness of ourselves. we are talking now. You and me maybe because of we decided to, build this.

So we, it was a way for us to, say to everyone, Hey, this is us. We are doing things like

[00:16:20] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. Yeah.

[00:16:22] Amadeu Arderiu: And it was two years ago. So now the question is really different because now we are, we have to pay this, usage and these machines Each month and we have to decide if we keep doing it or we find a fit for it.

For, I know some use case or some customers, I'm not sure if we will find it, eventually, but at the moment we are thinking that maybe, providers like hostings or people that has. or companies that has a lot of installations would be interested into using our API or our services, let's say, to allow their users to search more securely and smarter in, in their applica, in their applications.

Let's say at the moment, let me say that modular RDSA startup from Spain, that is this maintenance,

[00:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: I know. I know them. Yep.

[00:17:25] Amadeu Arderiu: Okay. they are using our API, So let's say we have our first customer there. So that's our idea,

[00:17:36] Nathan Wrigley: a really interesting idea. as an example, so modular DS is like a, way of keeping track of multiple. websites. So there are various rivals out there, if you're an agency owner and you've got, I dunno, 50 websites to maintain or something like modular DS can make that whole process easy.

You log into this sort of central dashboard and so therefore having the capacity to search for different plugins maybe that you or your clients want to have, you could. Discover different things for them. the other one that occurred to me is like hosting companies, who maybe want to, put something like this in front of their clients and maybe they would even have relationships, I don't know, affiliate relationships or something like that whereby, you install a plugin.

Through plugins and it's a premium plugin. Maybe there's some, a small affiliate commission that could fly in either direction or something like that. So I think there's definitely ways of making this work. It's whether or not, I guess you've got the time and capacity to make that happen, but hosting companies seem to be.

a good bet. the, reason that this is more timely than ever, I think is, I dunno, if you've come across the fair project,

th this seems to map in various ways to what you are doing. it's not an AI search as such. It's like a, how, to describe it. It's a federated.

Version of the, the WordPress repository at, a basic, but then they also add in, other plugins as well from different sources. I dunno if they add in premium plugins as well. But it does seem like there's kind of interest in this type of project, renewed by the interest in things like fare and things like that.

I dunno if you've got anything you want to

add

there.

[00:19:20] Amadeu Arderiu: the core tech that we are using or developed, the, main thing that is really unique to plugins, Can be attachable to, let's say, the Wordpress.org, directory to FAIR, to let's say, any way of, searching for plugins. can be attachable because it's really, it's not an algorithm.

It's not really that sophisticated, but it's like a, layer in between the query and the results that. A.I and some, some things that we had to do and, we discovered and some interesting technology there that would, translate this into, specific queries for the plugin database. So yes, this technology, this semantic search, technology can be attachable in some layers.

In, let's say the fair, project or even the, workers at org directory, or, i dunno, how many other ideas would, emerge in the future, but

[00:20:25] Nathan Wrigley: the, thing that strikes me is if you go to wordpress.org, you know what you're getting, you're gonna get whatever their search algorithm is, and a actually, the wordpress.org search algorithm is available. You can actually inspect what that algorithm is. It is, it might be, it might look impenetrable, but there is.

Logic and you can see what that logic is. But when you, start looking for something premium, you, really are relying on a search engine at this point. And so you are, you're gonna find out what Google offers you and who knows the heck is going on there. But I like the fact that this puts free and paid ones in the same interface.

I think that's why it's so interesting, because you'd be able to see. Things that are free alongside things that are premium, and I just think that's a really unique offering. I think that's really credible.

[00:21:16] Amadeu Arderiu: the thing is, I, think our mistake due to these two years. one of them is that we actually don't, we don't know at this moment, either where to f focus or where to let's say, feature, the, project. I you said the, interesting thing is that we have both community and Premium, but I don't, know, I don't think this is really featured in the project itself.

we have a lot of, not a lot, but we have some things working on the project. In the platform. We have an API also, we have a WordPress plugin also that gives you this experience inside your own website. But we may have to think about how to present this to the, people. which is the best.

The best part of it is that we have both community and Premium?

Is it the filtering? i dunno. We have to maybe to continue validating it and maybe changing how to, tell the project,

[00:22:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and with any marketplace, you do need, you need revenue to keep it going as well, don't you? You need to figure out a revenue model in order that your infrastructure can stand up and be, you can pay the bills for that each and every day. 'cause

you,

[00:22:37] Amadeu Arderiu: Yes,

[00:22:38] Nathan Wrigley: you can't just keep going on a philanthropic way for.

[00:22:42] Amadeu Arderiu: I, I know, but for now, for our, for.

ourselves, this is paying off. we are getting more visibility. We are talking to people. I suppose we would have difficult time to, reach reaching them. I dunno about the feature, but for at the moment it is, giving us opportunities.

[00:23:05] Nathan Wrigley: there you go. And if that's, the, what it gives you and that you're happy with that, bravo to you. That's brilliant. So I'll just read the URL one more time. So it's plugins, P-L-O-O-G, IN s.com.

[00:23:18] Amadeu Arderiu: Let.

[00:23:18] Nathan Wrigley: so there's one of the three things that we're gonna. Discussed today. Now the, second one, let's, 'cause I, I had I wasn't entirely sure which way around we do it.

Let's go for, join chat. So fantastic URL by the way, if you're gonna name a product, join chat, getting the URL join chat. Pretty cool. not sure if that was freely available, but you did well capturing that. So join.chat, and you're gonna see there, this is billing itself as increase your profits and support team's productivity by auto automating 80% of customer queries.

Maybe that'll explain to most people what we're doing, but do you just wanna roughly sketch out what this project is?

[00:24:00] Amadeu Arderiu: Yes, maybe people would already know about Join Chat, because Join Chat is a community plugin like free plugin This famous plug-in for the floating what? a button on the bottom left, the bottom right corner.

[00:24:17] Nathan Wrigley: there it is. I see it. Not right now.

[00:24:19] Amadeu Arderiu: this plug-in was developed, by a Spanish company, really similar to us. They are three partners, maybe a little bit older than us, but they're from Spain and we met, on one of these Work Camps in Spain.

we are crazy about Work Camps There. we have like almost 10 per year. So a lot of opportunities to meet people, and we decided to create a new add-on for, this plug-in, Let's say join Chat AI, and let's, we joined Venture, if it's a ve, I dunno how to say, joined Venture this.

[00:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: That'll do.

[00:25:00] Amadeu Arderiu: We venture this add-on and this add-on is turning this, let's say, simple plug-in like only a quads, a button. And if you have this add-on this button actually opens a chat and it uses AI and answers only using the content that is published in your website. And inside the pub, the plug-in, through the settings you can decide which CPTs let's say, which posts or content.

are going to be indexed for the AI to use. We try to be really native, so it you just, you it, there is no script, no iframe, nothing, just a plug-in, and app, API key and just from the plug-in itself, you can, configure everything.

[00:25:48] Nathan Wrigley: So basically is it like, it's kinda like having a conversation with the website because the only thing it can describe back to you, so if you ask it a question, some random question. I don't know when were in what year did, Abraham Lincoln become president of the United States. If this is not a website, which contains that information, so it's not a history website, for example, it's gonna come up.

With no answer, but if your website happens to have that, then yeah, it will. So this is perfect for people who want to put something like, it's like search on steroids in a way, isn't it? you get the ability to talk to the website about the content, and from what you've described, you can make it make custom post types available, different fields and what have you.

You can say in the plugin settings, yeah, this is available, but this. It's not, we wanna keep this one kind of ring fenced around these kind of topics. That's a really cool idea. is it, does it in, your, I, know you've got a, you probably just want to, big it up and what have you, but what's your experience with it?

Does it give you interesting, unique chats in the way that you had intended when you started building it?

[00:27:01] Amadeu Arderiu: you can't imagine how the support for, this pla plug-in, is because it's, each ticket is really unique because people, our customers have. Their cost, their customers are really, unique, asking, things. AI is really unpredictable sometimes. And this project, and this pla this product gives the opportunity to people to be creative and to, find limits, for this, So the main challenge of the plugin is first to tell the. users, the, people who is going to use the plugin in the admin section, how to really configure correctly to, to be so hallucinating.

[00:27:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:27:55] Amadeu Arderiu: And then to also. Explain them why the AI is, how it is, because sometimes, we put too much expectations on, on, on AI nowadays, and sometimes it, it fails really, badly.

So the challenge is to, start, explaining how it is to have your own chatbot, your own AI chatbot in your website, and expectations how to, Check it, regularly, because this prompt, or let's say the instructions that you can type down in the plugin configuration, those are like open for you, if you buy the plug-in you can write anything you want, like an instruction.

You can instruct the chatbot to be, i don't know, like a good pre-sales, something or even.

[00:28:52] Nathan Wrigley: liar.

[00:28:53] Amadeu Arderiu: Yes. So it's ha giving you a weapon and then having a support for that weapon, So i

don't know if that answers but,

[00:29:05] Nathan Wrigley: really interesting because although, the, interface on the screenshot that you've got is, I presume in Spanish there's English text next to it. So I can see the setting screen and there's, a chat id, which I presume is, maybe like an open AI key or something like that.

And then there's this, section where you can give it, there's a couple of fields where you can give it. Guardrails, if you like, you tell it what it is that you, how you wish it to behave. I was wondering though, if you provide context that is not available in the plugin setting. So for example, do you wrap around it your own context, which might be something along the lines of, when you provide a response, make sure that you.

Only look at the sources that are on this particular domain. Do, you add any of that or am I completely free to write whatever I like in, in the, sort of context prompt? or do you constrain that a little bit

yourselves?

[00:30:06] Amadeu Arderiu: is our question and we decided that, at least our understanding this, we decided that we would be like really open source about So it's whatever you want.

[00:30:21] Nathan Wrigley: Anything. Okay. So

[00:30:22] Amadeu Arderiu: but I mean we, we only decided to. To add something that is called the unsafe, setting. If you, this is, maybe it's a little bit, silly, but when we started this project, we had GPT-3 0.5, I think. So it was, really

bad. And I had this test, called the Elon Musk test because I wanted, my website, the test website did not write anything about Elon Musk. But, and I wanted to, see if I could ask the AI to tell me, I don't know who he is because it's not written in your website. So we managed to, how do you say, to not allow

[00:31:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. persuade it to,

[00:31:11] Amadeu Arderiu: to, not tell me who he was or who he's, and it was like for me, the Elon Musk test, but we, went so much, ahead of constraining it, that we had to add an unsafe setting to the plane. I now, it's like on the fault because people actually, told us like, it's okay, let the AI say Things that are not, Related to my website because it's natural in, in a conversation to

[00:31:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting.

[00:31:44] Amadeu Arderiu: but they're paying, our customers are paying the ai telling, writing things that are not related to the business. And i said, okay, I'm safe for everyone because I, I thought in my engineering perspective that people would not like the AI to answer things that are like common or, common culture or things like that.

dunno how to explain it.

[00:32:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because let's say for example, you've got, I don't know, a WooCommerce store and it sells I clothes or something. You want the conversation to be about the clothes, but equally, maybe there's a bunch of WooCommerce store owners out there who are happy for it to go off the guardrails and Okay.

Yeah, sure. We'll get into, we'll get into chat around something else if you so wish it, I'm paying the, I'm paying the API bill. Whatever, but, it's interesting that you've got the options in there so you can constrain it in whichever way you like. And you as a plugin developer have not told the plugin, to, make sure that it lives within the walled garden of your website.

And the curious thing about that is, let's say for example, I have a, I don't know, a, website and it's all about history. and I've written. A thousand blog posts all about Roman history. Sure, it'd be interesting to go and chat about Roman history, but equally it would be fun to go off in slightly different history directions as well that would make the whole thing a little bit more interesting, useful.

So long as it didn't, end up lying to me. That would be, all right. But I appreciate that. I like the fact that you've given. G you've given them enough rope to, to do what they like and if they wish to do peculiar things with, their prompts,

to them.

[00:33:26] Amadeu Arderiu: yes. let me tell you an example where, as a company, we love to sponsor when we can, work camps, in Spain. And when we do that, we always, create a game for the booth.

[00:33:41] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.

[00:33:42] Amadeu Arderiu: Yes. And one, one of those games along with joint chat team, the six of us, three them and three us, we decided to create the who is who, game of A welcome, using the speakers and using the chat.

So the instructions were, choose a random speaker from this list and we upload, information from each one of them. And ask, sorry, interchange questions and answers from, the user until, they, how you say, guess the name correctly. And so you can build things like this. maybe not really business related,

[00:34:29] Nathan Wrigley: but it's fun.

[00:34:30] Amadeu Arderiu: But fun. Yes. So you, can do, the best use case for this is the most boring ones. So just to explain some really boring things, like rules for, let's say amusement park rules of an amusement park. Like how, if i can bring food, things like this. This is perfect for this project, but also i like to think that this other fun.

use case use Cases are, possible. No,

[00:35:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And you know what, like the, I think it's fair to say that the internet of the last, let's go for 25 years, has been one of filling, like going and looking at content. So consuming stuff, and then at the very most, filling out form fields to input stuff. And that's about what you can do on the internet of the last years.

you can look at information, you can add information with form fields, and then, you've got the Web 2.0 where we tried to interact with other humans and social networks and things like that. But you, were unable to communicate with. The website, you search, go Google, et cetera.

Were the best that you could have. I think this is how websites are gonna behave in the future. There's gonna be this dialogue with an AI that the likes of my children. That's gonna be completely normal. You won't expect to go to a website and click on links to get to one page and another page You're gonna go there and have the expectation that you can talk to it. So your example, the amusement part one is perfect. go to the website. Okay. Here I am. What time do you open? I don't wanna find it. I just wanna ask what time do you open and I want to get the answer, and I wanna know if you close this Sunday or if you're open this Sunday.

What kind of, what the weather's gonna be like, what kind of things should I bring? That kind of thing. And this will be completely normal, I imagine. It's not a world that I'm that comfortable with or familiar with. I kinda like the old web, if But it is the way that it's gonna be.

And so you have a solution. It enables you to add a chat bot. like the intercom widget that you see on a billion websites out there. the little bubble at the bottom right hand corner. You click on it and.

[00:36:50] Amadeu Arderiu: that's it

[00:36:51] Nathan Wrigley: off. You're off to the races. What a fun project. That's really,

interesting.

[00:36:56] Amadeu Arderiu: some, a couple of boring technical things. The plugin has also AI actions, like if, then

[00:37:04] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:37:05] Amadeu Arderiu: if the AI thinks that the user is, asking for a human. We will show the WhatsApp button, for example, or show a, calendar link if, i mean you can just decide, things, you configure the if, and then we also have webhooks to send data to CMS and so on.

And we are now working on this WooCommerce. integration And we are thinking like having Carousel and at. to cart buttons directly in the chat. I'm not talking about so innovative things, but nice to have things in this, chat nowadays because it's how you say, as you say, the way of interacting with the website.

so also how to, buy things in your, story if you ask for them.

[00:38:00] Nathan Wrigley: that's really interesting. So as an example, you may set a condition of, I don't know, so this is a really blunt one, but, you've asked four questions. If you've asked four questions. Pop up an email capture field or something like that so that you could send to your CRM. 'cause clearly this person is slightly engaged.

They're a bit, they're kinda warm, they're a warm lead. So capture their email information, send it off through a web hook to, I don't know, your CRM or whatever it may be. And then in, in that way, you've, got another channel to capture information or who, knows what that might be. Okay. So that's really interesting as well.

So there's conditions. That you can, force into that conversation if you like as well, and steer it in different directions. Okay, so there we go. That was join. Chat again, links in the show notes. those two projects absolutely fabulous. But this last one I think is gonna be probably the most word, pressy one of all, especially if you're into the block editor.

Now I'm gonna, I'm gonna look at my notes here so that I pronounce it correctly. 'cause it's not that straightforward for me to pronounce. So su, I think su.

[00:39:08] Amadeu Arderiu: Yes.

[00:39:08] Nathan Wrigley: good. I'm gonna spell it because it's probably easier to remember this way. SUGG. E-R-E-N-C e.com. SU double G-E-R-E-N-C e.com. If you go there, you're gonna see what it's all about.

But maybe if you append that URL with gutenberg.suran.com, you will end up with, I guess playground or something. I dunno exactly what I'm looking at there, but it feels like I might be in a playground instance or something like that. This is super cool. I've had literally 10 seconds to play with it, and already in 10 seconds I could totally see.

Wow, what the heck? so if you were to go there, you'll notice that you are in a completely blank,

let's say post screen. So you've got the Gutenberg interface, you are, we're all familiar with that. But look at the bottom right of the screen and you will have a, what looks like, a form field to fill out.

And it's saying, tell me something to do basically. So I said, you know what, all people on the internet do write me a post about cats and then add in some cat images. Great. It did. That took about 15 seconds. It gives me a nice rundown of what it's doing at this moment in time. So it, it says, I'm thinking about the image.

I've gone out to open verse to find the image. I'm now concentrating on the text. I'm writing the text and it did it. and then I said, okay, I don't want the image there. Put the image above the paragraph and it did it. Okay. And that's where my experimenting ran out. Pretty basic. I know. But the point being, I'm in.

The Gutenberg interface doing all this, it's not like this new thing that OpenAI have launched where you've got this new Atlas browser where it's using, gosh, I don't even know what that is. like a chromium derivative or something like that, where it's trying to do this thing overlaid on the top and it tries to grab the cursor and move the cursor to the appropriate bit.

This is all doing it inside of the Gutenberg interface. Natively. This is pretty clever. I, dunno how deep you are into this project, but just tell us what your intention is, maybe what the idea is where, what's your roadmap? Where are you trying to go with this?

[00:41:30] Amadeu Arderiu: let me try to answer. We spent one year working on a project that nobody saw. maybe a couple of people. It was not su, it was called Site Mate, and it was a non mcp agent. We were like, it was a nightmare. We had to research a lot of things, like even train a an AI model for intent recognition to understand what the user wanted.

And when we decided to end this project, it was this year on work, Europe. We were in our booth and we decided, people are saying good things, but we are seeing some problems also. And this MCP started this MCP trend as we know now that is really, staying everyone.

[00:42:21] Nathan Wrigley: It's really

hot. Yeah.

[00:42:22] Amadeu Arderiu: So we were then, I think we had that much of frustration during that year that we spent like a couple of weeks to focus on creating something and.

We were like brainstorming, like you can imagine like, really drunk, brainstorming, not drunk, really. like literally drunk, but like really poof, like a storm. And eventually we decided, we talked about a lot of things that I'm not going to tell you now because it would be like really long now.

And the end we decided to, to, focus on the most native and also the most. A challenging aspect of WordPress nowadays, and we thought that is the block editor and also, and luckily for us, the block editor has a good, let's say it's not an API but let's call it an API A way to interact with it. It's nice and we can actually do it in a client

state in inside the browser

And we decided each day that it was a good idea and we kept, telling ourselves that it was a good idea And eventually we said we may spend a lot of time again and maybe failing, and again, not failing, but deciding to stop. So let's just start experimenting and showing the experiment from the first day open.

To the public. And that is that website that you mentioned. It is an experiment Tomorrow actually we are, we're changing the AI model. So now today you're using something that is already, obsolete because tomorrow we are releasing a new one, a new AI model Not ours, not our model but we're changing providers and it's, working better now.

So it's a work in progress, project. i dunno where it would end. We are. Thinking about monetizing it, obviously there are a couple of ideas. You could, use your own API key from let's say Anthropic or open ai, or you could pay us like the course model pay us and we would use your credits to pay the, providers and keep some percentage. i actually don't remember your question,

[00:44:44] Nathan Wrigley: no it was more, it was really about describing it. I think the thing which is interesting to me is because it's in the block editor interface, you can ask it to do block editory things. So example, I said, so it's really basic, right? But I said. Okay, move the, so I had a paragraph and an image.

That's all I had. I said, move the image above the paragraph. Obviously that's like really a trivial thing for a human being to do. but it did, it had an understanding that, okay, this thing is movable. This, image is a separate thing to this paragraph. We can move them around. Which then I guess brings the question to me.

what are the constraints around this? for example, we know that in a, I don't know, in a default version of WordPress, I don't know how many blocks I've got, but it must be in the order of 70, something like that. There are 70 block. Many of them, I don't even know what they do.

[00:45:38] Amadeu Arderiu: some, yes,

[00:45:39] Nathan Wrigley: yes, quite a few of them.

Could I interact with. Any of those. So o obviously I, used, I used an image and I used a paragraph. But let's say for example, I wanted to group things together or I wanted to add in buttons, or I wanted to put separators or page breaks or grids or whatever it may be. Ca can I, interact through the this in interface?

Can I ask it to do any of those things?

[00:46:06] Amadeu Arderiu: The agent knows which blocks, are you using in the current installation. how the blocks that you have installed. Sorry. And they, and it can use them. So you can ask for a column layout, cover it even can search patterns from the pattern library. So instead of creating a brand new, let's say, pricing table.

You, the AI will, will under will understand that this is a complex thing to ask. So it'll first look into the patterns and see if there is something that can help Nowadays, it will, give you the first choice. So it's not that smart yet, but it's, searches, in the patterns collection. The, thing is, the interesting thing is to be compatible with it.

Any, sorry, to all, block, plug-ins let's say? No. The, plug-ins that gives, neo

[00:47:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:47:12] Amadeu Arderiu: and we are working on that now. We are also working on sub agents. Like I have this really bad SEO page and i just type, please fix this and. An SEO soup agent, let's call it, that, will look into the keywords, will set the alt text for all images.

So I see this project being most useful in this scenario than a blank page because I know I have, I had this feedback a lot through these weeks. this is not solving anything because. I'm giving you a blank page, so I know that you would start, it's easy for you to just, drag some blocks and that's it.

But imagine if you have a page or a post from five years ago with a lot of broken blocks, a lot of legacy blocks. I dunno, things that are like really difficult for you to just, okay, let's start fixing this. That is a good scenario for using this. And actually I'm thinking in the demo soon to allow you, like in a video game, to choose like your mission.

Like you want a blank stage, blank state page. You want a messy page. You want, that way you would be able to, and we would, listen to everyone, if. In any particular case, this is useful because i know that moving blocks around and adding things is really an overkill to use ai. I even me that I, am part of this, would say that is not the best way to, to do it.

But I'm not saying that you should use the chat all the time. Only when it makes sense, because you as human would have a lot of. Not problems, but you would spend too much time fixing things or adding things. So actually it's an experiment.

[00:49:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And do you know what? You can't get there unless you've been here, if Like the ai, the, ai, the, capacity in the future to, let's say through, I don't know, a microphone to be able to talk to your ai. So instead of me typing it and saying, move the picture of the cat up above the paragraph, and unless we go.

Here first. we can't get there and unless we do the baby steps, which maybe you are thinking, this is the baby steps,

we can't to the more complicated things unless we go through the hoops of achieving the, less complicated things. So that's that's where I see this at the moment.

it's that promise of being able to do things that you never dreamed were possible just three years ago. We are now with, people like you are coming up with UIs, coming up with concepts and trying things out, and it's a work in progress and does this work? Maybe there's a superior way of doing it.

That's what you're doing. And I, think it's really interesting that it shows you the output. Incidentally, rather than going out and generating an image, it actually, told me that it was going to search open verse, which is freely available, CC zero, images, so you don't have to worry about attribution or anything like that, although it did.

At it did offer the attribute as a sort of a, caption at the bottom of the image, which is quite nice as well. But the, this is how we get there, right? If we wanna have the, option to, do those kind of things, and you want to be able to create blog posts and things all through this interface, we have to go through these little hoops.

I was wondering, you mentioned about SEO, You talked about things inside of the content, the WordPress content, so alt text, maybe tidying up the, text and what have you, and maybe putting keywords in different places and what have you. is it possible in the current implementation, is it possible to get inside of metadata as well?

So let's say, for example, I had a, I don't know, an SEO plugin or something like that.

With the, current implementation, is it just bound inside the content or can it get inside metadata as well?

[00:51:22] Amadeu Arderiu: At the moment only, it only works. it only knows the current content the current page, but at the bottom part of the chat, there are some buttons

[00:51:34] Nathan Wrigley: see those.

[00:51:34] Amadeu Arderiu: that sometimes are, for, what? There is a context button that you can add context from other pages or posts. There is also a canvas, button.

You can draw things. Like drawing a

[00:51:52] Nathan Wrigley: I see that. super cool.

[00:51:54] Amadeu Arderiu: that, that's really experimental because it works sometimes. Okay. Like drawing three columns and say Okay. and even writing things in the canvas, it also has a microphone. So we are adding, this is like the, for, us it's like a sweet moment because we are engineers, we are creative, and we have this an explored feature like.

Using a chat to build a Gutenberg page. And we are just having fun. So we are adding things, we are shipping things that may be broken. I'm sorry, but it's okay because we just want to, see if it, if they resonate with people, if they, if these things are really like impressing, WordPress.

community.

So yes, you can add context from other pages. You can draw things. if you want to generate an image, you can draw, like a car image and just say, generate me an image from this drawing and things like that. we are now working on block gen generation, feature. That is, maybe for this week or so. it would be really, not styled and the UI would be, will be like really simple, but to generate a block like Telex, because we love Telex and it was really an, inspiration

[00:53:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No kidding. Pretty

[00:53:23] Amadeu Arderiu: like

[00:53:24] Nathan Wrigley: eh?

[00:53:25] Amadeu Arderiu: open Playground It's, I mean we now maybe used to, to it, but Playground is really mind blowing because you are.

I'm not telling you that you can open another demo or you can download the plugin. I'm actually putting the demo inside of your face in a couple of seconds just by hitting the URL. So block generation is also coming. to generator block is really, a challenge, but also to have it. Ready to use in your own website.

In a couple of seconds after it, it is generated, it's like a another story. So we are also working on that and for now, and at least in the short term, it will keep, being an open experiment But, we have to think eventually. If this is a product and if it is a product, how to, to tell people to it

[00:54:27] Nathan Wrigley: honestly, it's so interesting. So I've got the interface open and I'm drawing things as you are

[00:54:33] Amadeu Arderiu: i I was seeing you. That you were just distracted somehow and I suppose

[00:54:39] Nathan Wrigley: in the best possible way. So I, tried draw out some columns and it didn't, it didn't give me what I was expecting, but it was like trying to, I could see it was the feedback that it was giving me, it was exploring like patterns and things like that.

It was going in, seeing if there were patterns that. A were adjacent to, because I was distracted, I wasn't doing a very good job with the drawings, so they were all like really wobbly and n no, there were no straight lines or anything like that. So maybe it would do a, an interesting job if I tried harder, but it's what the heck is that?

Drawing things as an idea to, to create structure within a website. Just like drawing a, line drawing and thinking, wow,

okay, there's

[00:55:21] Amadeu Arderiu: I stole. I stole that idea, I stole that idea from my conversation that i had in a work that someone told me that it was so easy to build nowadays with Guttenberg because he draw some layout and ask CLO or open AI to, do some, I don't remember that, to do some scaffold or boiler plate it.

And I thought, that could be interesting. And I just, we just did the button. But it's not that it's unpredictable as you said, but i think if we manage to get it working for almost all the time, all the, all, the time, no, all the, sorry for all cases. It would be a really interesting way to, to create layouts in Guten because.

Lemme say one quick thing. I know people say Guten me or the block editor nowadays or traditionally is more useful for writing posts but I do really think that guten me at some point will be really a good solution for layout also.

[00:56:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:56:32] Amadeu Arderiu: So let's add some tools, when it is, maybe it is now, but when it is even better to be a layout solution.

More tools for the u for people to, to, feel that they need to use Gutenberg. So this project for us is also a way to, to feature Gutenberg in an our humble way. like Gutenberg is awesome. So let's say that, let's, build this,

[00:57:00] Nathan Wrigley: really interesting 'cause I did this, I, basically tried to I basically drew a square and put a line down the middle of it trying to imply, give me two. To a left and a right something, two containers if you And it wasn't able to do that, but it did come back and it gave me useful telemetry saying that it was getting there.

So it said things like it, I, it didn't say exactly this, but I'll give you an idea of what it was saying that it's kind thinking that I might be going for a two column layout with a, perhaps for a hero section, maybe there would be an image on the left and a button on the right.

And it's saying. The proportions might be a 50 50 split. Honestly, I just drew a square and put a line through the middle of it and it intuited this kind of stuff. And then it's asking me, just collaborate with me a little bit, give me some more intel. In fact, it says, please provide a descriptive input so I can assist you from here.

So it's got a handle on what I'm doing, and if I wasn't talking to you and I was applying more concentration to what I was doing. This is amazing. I've said this into the podcast a few times, but in, I think it was 2017, I attended a word camp in London, word Camp London, and there was a guy from Adobe there and the guy from Adobe was stood on the stage and he was talking about the era in which you would communicate with your.

In this manner. And he was saying, you'll say, give me a picture of a cat. Not that cat, a different cat. Okay, can I have a button underneath it? No. I want the button to be red. Not that red. A slightly darker red. And I remember thinking, this guy's making it up. It, how is this ever gonna happen? And here we are, like less than a decade later and.

Here it is. it's just like this kind stuff is creeping in and it, this time next year, it'll be insane

[00:58:52] Amadeu Arderiu: Yes.

[00:58:52] Nathan Wrigley: do.

[00:58:54] Amadeu Arderiu: So yes, building products with AI nowadays is really risky because, but, the same time is, magical because first, if the first one that is impressed by this is the one who is building the solution the first time, it actually does the things that you. Thought that it would do. That moment is like I, it's difficult on to, to describe because it's like creating the magic yourself.

You are creating that, but on the other hand, on the other hand, it's really sometimes not frustrating, but it's really hard because people, and I mean my myself also, we are used to this magic nowadays, so it's really difficult to impress people. maybe now you're impressed a little bit tomorrow.

This drawing thing that you tested is not impressing you anymore. So it's like really the impress impressing window is really small now. Like you need to keep doing things to impress people.

[00:59:59] Nathan Wrigley: don't you think that's the kind of crazy making thing about this in that like my eight, eight year older self. Would've looked at what we can do now. And I would be like, wow, we're in Star Trek. we're living like in some kind of science fiction world, and yet now I'm completely used to it.

I'm waiting for the next adrenaline hit, the

[01:00:20] Amadeu Arderiu: yes, we are

[01:00:21] Nathan Wrigley: along. And, and we've we had for years, we had this kind of Turing test as the, measure of when an, when a, an artificial intelligence could be, it's human level. And we broke through that.

Probably, two or three years ago. and nobody seemed to notice and, everybody then just went, the jury test was a bit of a silly test it turned out, and yet we were holding onto that for ages. It is miraculous. You've gotta check this out. I'll just read in the URL again. So if you go to, probably the easiest thing is Gutenberg.

Suen, let me just make sure I'm pronouncing that correctly. Yes. Suen, SU double G-E-R-E-N-C e.com. Go and check it out. By tomorrow it'll be a different version so you won't

[01:01:07] Amadeu Arderiu: No but lit. Literally, yes. It will I'm not joking. Maybe worse.

[01:01:12] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, maybe I'll draw the square and it'll totally grasp what I'm on about straight away. Go and check it out.

if you haven't played with AI inside the block editor, and you can interact with all the native blocks and just have a mess around and, and give some feedback because, I'm pretty sure that Amadeo will be more than happy to, to hear from you. With that in mind, Amadeo, where do people.

Find out about, so we've talked about three things. If anybody's interested in any of those things and wants to have a chat with you, where's the best place to discover you or with you?

[01:01:46] Amadeu Arderiu: a couple of months ago, maybe more than a couple, I started to being visible in the social media ecosystem. Now I am really, Active on X or Twitter. So I think for people, if they want to know more about what we are doing, because i try to share daily things from this project and couple of more things.

So on Twitter, Yes. Or X, sorry. myself as, my personal, account. So that would be the best way to follow. What we do and we, and obviously to send me some messages if

[01:02:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's perfect. When we, end the call, I'll get the, I'll get your handle and I will put it into the show notes that anybody that wants to, to follow up can do that. oh, what a pleasure. That was such an interesting foray into three totally different things. So we've got a plugin directory powered by ai.

We've got a. chat with your website system powered by ai. And then we've got a really fascinating project where you can just chat with the block editor and see what the heck it does. Just what a powerful lot of things. thank you so much for chatting to me today, Amadou. That is fascinating.

Yeah. Have a nice day

[01:03:10] Amadeu Arderiu: Thank you, you too.

[01:03:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all that we've got time for today. I hope that you enjoyed it. If you did, head to wpbuilds.com, search for episode number 443, and leave us a comment there. Well leave us a comment there even if you didn't enjoy it. We would certainly appreciate that.

Just a quick reminder that we've got our Black Friday deals page, wpbuilds.com/black. If you would like to get your products on there, hit the add a deal button, and don't forget the sponsorship cards, which you can find at the top of that page as well. We'd love to get you in pride of place in this very busy time, the run up to Black Friday.

The WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by GoDaddy Pro. GoDaddy Pro, the home of managed WordPress hosting that includes free domain, SSL, and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% off new purchases. Find out more at go.me/wpbuilds.

We're also helped out by Bluehost. Bluehost, redefine your web hosting experience with Bluehost Cloud. Managed WordPress hosting that comes with lightning fast websites, 100% network uptime, and 24 7 priority support. With Bluehost Cloud, the possibilities are outta this world. Experience it today bluehost.com/cloud.

And we're also joined by Omnisend. Omnisend, do you sell your stuff online? Then meet Omnisend. Yes, that Omnisend. The email and SMS tool that helps you make 73 bucks for every dollar spent. The one that's so good, it's almost boring. Hate the excitement of rollercoaster sales? Prefer a steady line going up? Try Omnisend today at omnisend.com.

And thanks go to Bluehost, GoDaddy Pro, and Omnisend for their continuing support of the WP Builds Podcast. Remember, if you'd like to join them, wpbuilds.com/advertise.

Okay, that really is all that I have got time for. I hope that you stay safe and have a nice week. Bye-bye for now.