How to set up Tidio AI chatbot: A step-by-step 2025 guide

So, you’re thinking about adding an AI chatbot to your website. Smart move. Chatbots have become a standard tool for businesses that want to give customers instant answers and take some weight off their support team’s shoulders. They can handle the common questions around the clock, letting your human agents focus on more complex problems.

One of the popular options out there is Tidio, a platform that bundles a live chat widget with an AI agent called Lyro. If you’re looking to get started with automated support, you’re in the right place. This guide will walk you through exactly how to set up the Tidio AI chatbot on your website.

What you’ll need to get started with the Tidio AI chatbot

Alright, before we jump into the setup, let’s get our ducks in a row. You’ll only need a few things, and having them ready will make this whole process a lot faster.

• A Tidio account. You can sign up for their free plan to get started.
• Admin access to your website’s backend, whether you’re using WordPress, Shopify, or something else.
• A few of your main knowledge sources handy, like the URLs for your FAQ page or help center.

How to set up the Tidio AI chatbot in 5 steps

Got everything from the list above? Great. Let’s get this chatbot built. We’ll walk through it in five simple steps, from getting it installed to making sure it’s ready for your customers.

Step 1: Install and activate the Tidio plugin for the Tidio AI chatbot

The first step is hooking Tidio up to your website. If you’re using WordPress, the easiest way is with their plugin.

Log into your WordPress admin dashboard, head over to "Plugins" in the sidebar, and click "Add New." Type "Tidio" into the search bar, and you’ll see the Tidio – Live Chat & AI Chatbots plugin. Click "Install Now" and then "Activate." Once that’s done, you’ll see a new Tidio icon in your menu. This automatically adds the chat widget to your site, making it live for visitors.

If you aren’t on WordPress, don’t worry. Tidio has straightforward installation guides for other major platforms like Shopify and Squarespace.

Step 2: Enable Lyro, the Tidio AI chatbot

Now that the Tidio widget is on your site, it’s time to give it a brain. Inside your Tidio dashboard, find the Lyro AI Agent section in the main menu on the left. This is where you’ll switch on the AI.

You’ll land on an intro page. Just click the "Set up Lyro AI Agent" button to move forward. One thing to know here is how Tidio’s pricing works. You get 50 free conversations to test Lyro. Once you use them up, the bot will be disabled until you upgrade to a paid Lyro AI Agent plan, which comes with a monthly conversation limit. It’s useful for a test drive, but you’ll need to budget for the subscription if you plan to use it long-term.

Step 3: Train your Tidio AI chatbot by adding knowledge sources

An AI chatbot is only as good as the information it’s trained on. Tidio gives you a few ways to feed knowledge to your bot, which you’ll find under the Knowledge > Data sources tab.

Here are the different ways you can add information:

• Website URL: You can point Lyro to a specific page, like your FAQ, or your entire site, and it will scan the content to learn from it.
• Add manually: For specific questions you know people ask, you can create your own question-and-answer pairs one by one.
• Import file: If you have a list of Q&As, you can upload them in a CSV file.
• Import from Zendesk Help Center: If your knowledge base is already on Zendesk, you can import articles directly from there.

Just feeding your bot FAQ articles is a decent start, but it often isn’t enough. Formal help docs don’t always capture the way real customers describe their problems.
Pro Tip: For the bot to give truly helpful answers, it needs to learn from real-world conversations. This is where a tool like eesel AI takes a different approach. Instead of just scraping a public webpage, eesel can connect directly to your helpdesk, like Zendesk or Freshdesk, and train on thousands of your past support tickets. This teaches the AI from the actual problems your team has already solved, which usually leads to much more accurate answers.

Step 4: Customize your Tidio AI chatbot behavior and personality

Next up, you’ll want to tweak your chatbot so it feels like a natural part of your brand. Head to the Configure tab in the Lyro settings. You’ll find several options to adjust how it behaves.
Here are a few key settings to look at:

• Handoff: This is an important one. You can set rules for when Lyro should stop trying to help and pass the chat to a human agent. You can trigger this if a customer asks to talk to a person or if the bot gets stumped.
• Tone of voice: Choose between a friendly, neutral, or formal tone to make sure the bot’s style matches your brand.
• Channels: You can decide where your Tidio AI chatbot is active. It works on your website’s live chat by default, but you can also turn it on for other channels like Facebook Messenger or Instagram.

Step 5: Test and refine your Tidio AI chatbot

Before you let your chatbot loose on your customers, you have to put it through its paces. Tidio has a Playground feature, which is basically a sandbox where you can ask the bot questions and see what it says. Use this to test it with your most common customer queries.

You should also keep an eye on the Suggestions list. This is Tidio’s report of all the questions Lyro couldn’t answer. By checking this list, you can spot gaps in its knowledge and add the missing information to make your bot more helpful over time.

Tips and common pitfalls for your Tidio AI chatbot

Getting the chatbot running is just the start. To make it truly useful, you’ll need to keep it updated and be aware of a few common issues that can slow down your support team.

Best practices for maintaining your Tidio AI chatbot knowledge base

An outdated knowledge base is the fastest way to a useless chatbot. Here are a few things to do to keep your bot sharp:

• Review suggestions weekly: Try to make a habit of checking the "Suggestions" tab once a week. It’s the best way to see what your bot is missing so you can fill in the gaps.
• Keep your sources fresh: Whenever you update your website’s FAQ or pricing, remember to go back into Tidio and re-sync the URL. A bot with old information can cause more problems than it solves.
• Test common questions: Every so often, pop into the Playground and ask your bot the top 5-10 questions your customers have. This helps you catch any weird or wrong answers before your customers do.

Avoiding the fragmented support workflow pitfall with the Tidio AI chatbot

One of the biggest headaches with standalone chat tools like Tidio is that they can create separate silos for your data and workflow. Think about it: a customer asks a question the chatbot can’t answer. The chat is handed off to a human agent in the Tidio inbox. But what if that agent needs to look up the customer’s order history or see past support tickets? They have to jump out of Tidio, open up your main help desk (like Zendesk), find the customer’s info, and then tab back to Tidio to reply. It’s clunky, inefficient, and slows your team down.

Compare that with a fully integrated setup. A tool like eesel AI doesn’t pull your team into yet another inbox. It adds an intelligent layer on top of the tools you already have. Its AI Copilot helps draft replies, its AI Agent resolves tickets automatically, and its AI Triage routes them, all without anyone having to leave their usual help desk.

Here’s a quick visual of how those two workflows look side-by-side:

Is a standalone Tidio AI chatbot enough for your team?

The Tidio AI chatbot is a solid tool, especially if you’re looking for a simple, self-contained solution for live chat and some basic automation. You can get it running pretty quickly, and it does a decent job of handling common questions from your FAQ.

But as your support needs grow, it’s worth asking yourself: does making my team juggle a separate chat platform alongside our main help desk actually create more work?

This is where you might think about a unified AI layer. Modern platforms like eesel AI aren’t trying to replace your favorite tools; they’re designed to make them smarter. By connecting directly to your entire support stack—your Zendesk help desk, your Slack channels, your Confluence knowledge base, and even your Shopify store—eesel helps you automate support across the systems your team already uses every day.

With an integrated platform, you can automate how tickets are routed, give every agent an AI Copilot that drafts replies for them, and resolve issues from start to finish within the tools you already know. If you’re ready to look beyond a simple chatbot and build a more connected support system, explore what you can build with eesel AI.