How to create a chatbot with Claude without coding: personality, knowledge base and publishing

Before you touch Claude, be clear on three things. This 5-minute step makes the biggest difference in the result.

1. Who it’s for and what it solves. Example: “answer customer questions about hours, prices and services at my salon.”
2. What it should NOT do. Example: “don’t give medical advice, don’t make up prices, don’t promise discounts.”
3. The tone. Formal and professional? Warm and friendly? Write it in one sentence: “kind, short and direct.”

Write it on paper or a note. You’ll copy it almost as-is in step 3.

A Project in Claude is a space with memory: it stores fixed instructions and documents that Claude will keep in mind in every conversation. That’s the body of your chatbot.

1. Go to https://claude.ai and sign in.
2. In the left menu, find Projects and click New project.
3. Give it a clear name, for example “Assistant for [Your Business]”.
4. Create the project. You’ll see a space with two key parts: project instructions and knowledge (files).

If you want to understand Projects in depth, we have a dedicated tutorial: How to use Claude Projects.

Here you turn your note from step 1 into the project instructions. This defines who the chatbot is and how it always behaves.

1. In your project, open Instructions (Set project instructions / Custom instructions).

2. Write something like this, adapted to your case:

   You are the virtual assistant for [Your Business]. Your job is to
   answer customer questions about our services, hours and prices.
   
   Tone: kind, short and direct. Reply in the customer's language.
   
   Rules:
   - Use only the information in the project documents.
   - If you don't know something, say so and offer to pass to a person.
   - Don't make up prices or promise discounts.
   - Don't give medical, legal or financial advice.

3. Save the instructions.

Be specific with the “what NOT to do” rules: that’s what keeps the chatbot from making things up or going off topic.

Knowledge is what makes the chatbot answer with your business data and not generic information. Here you give it the documents it should consult.

1. In your project, go to the knowledge section (Project knowledge) and use Add content or upload files.
2. Upload useful, up-to-date documents, for example:
   • Service and price list.
   • Frequently asked questions and their answers.
   • Policies (hours, returns, warranties).
   • An “about us” document.
3. You can also paste text directly if you don’t have files.

Less is more: upload clear and current information. If you upload documents with old or contradictory data, the chatbot gets confused. To build those documents well, see how to create a knowledge base with AI.

Now chat with your chatbot as if you were a customer. This back-and-forth is what makes it good.

1. Inside the project, open a new conversation and ask it the typical questions your customers ask.
2. Also test the hard questions: something not in the documents, or something off topic.
3. Watch for two things:
   • Does it answer with correct data from your documents?
   • Does it respect the tone and rules (no making things up, offers to pass to a person)?
4. If something fails, don’t rewrite everything: adjust the instructions or fix the document and test again.

Repeat this step 3 or 4 times. Each small tweak to the instructions greatly improves the answers.

You already have the brain ready. These are your options to actually use it, from simplest to most complete:

• Personal or team use. Use it yourself from the project for day-to-day tasks. With Claude’s Team plan you can share the project with your team.
• On your website (chat widget). The Claude app doesn’t generate a bubble for your site on its own. For that you use a no-code tool that connects to Claude through its API: for example Chatbase or Botpress. There you pick the Claude model, upload the same knowledge base and copy a snippet that you or your designer paste into the site (no coding). Confirm which models they support and their pricing on each tool’s official page.
• On WhatsApp. If your audience writes to you on WhatsApp, you can set up a bot there following our tutorial How to create a WhatsApp bot with AI.

Start with the simplest use that helps you today. You can grow to the web widget once the chatbot already answers well in testing.

Problem	Fix
The chatbot makes up data or prices	Reinforce “use only the information in the documents” in the instructions and check that the correct value is in a project file
It answers with old information	Update or replace the document in the knowledge base; Claude doesn’t learn on its own, you control what it knows
It goes off topic or gives advice it shouldn’t	Add clear “what NOT to do” rules in the project instructions
The tone isn’t what I want	Describe the tone in one concrete sentence in the instructions (e.g. “formal, short, polite”)
I can’t find Projects in Claude	Make sure you’re signed in; Projects appear in the left menu. The free plan has lower usage limits