We may actually be better off relying on external AI chatbots (copilot, chatgpt, etc.) for answering forum questions than a custom chatbot that focuses too much on this forum.
- External AI chatbots are are trained on the entire public internet, including this forum, all the Slicer source code, all the Slicer extensions source code and their documentation, github discussions, bug reports, feature requests, etc. so they may give more informed answers than a custom chatbot that is limited mostly to the Slicer Forum content.
- There are plenty of options for accessing external AI chatbots for free, while somebody would need to pay for the custom chatbot serving this forum.
One might argue that external AI chatbots may not be up-to-date, but my perception is that this is becoming less of a problem. For example, copilot already knows about the latest patch of the latest Slicer Stable Release.
A custom AI chatbot is essential for proprietary projects, because their source code, documentation, and forums are not visible to external chatbots - but this does not affect Slicer.
Custom solutions may also beneficial for some highly specialized tasks, such fine-tunings that allow creating Slicer modules from scratch just by telling what we want to do. However, for these most likely the chatbot will need to be able to operate Slicer, which a forum chatbot will not be able to do. This topic is discussed here: