Glossary of Terms

Air Gap by Default

No AI provider key is connected out of the box. Until an operator deliberately connects one of their own, any point where a question would otherwise go to an AI model instead hands the operator a composed prompt to copy and paste into a model of their choosing. No network call is made to any AI model on the operator's behalf unless one has been connected.

AML/KYC (Identity Verification)

Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer checks: verifying who someone is, often against official documents. My Chat Assistant has no identity-verification or document-ingestion capability, so this isn't something the product does.

Answer-First Citation Schema

The way a returned answer is structured with a direct reference link back to the exact source page it was drawn from, so the answer can be checked against the original content.

Audio Output (Spoken Replies)

The widget can read a reply aloud through the visitor's device speaker, alongside the on-screen text, rather than requiring the visitor to read every answer.

BM25

The ranking function My Chat Assistant uses to score and order indexed content by relevance to a question. It's the same industry-standard algorithm behind Elasticsearch, Lucene, and Solr, refined from the classic TF-IDF weighting scheme, with stemming and synonym expansion for accurate matches.

Caldicott Principles

A UK framework governing the use and sharing of confidential patient information, most relevant to healthcare deployments. The product's default, retrieval-only mode sends nothing to a third party and trains no model on visitor data; whether a specific deployment meets the Caldicott Principles depends on the operator's own configuration and any AI provider they choose to enable.

cPanel

A common web hosting control panel. My Chat Assistant deploys on standard cPanel accounts, shared hosting, or a managed VPS without requiring root server access or a custom container setup.

CQI Bot

The retrieval and chat engine that powers My Chat Assistant. "CQI Bot Static" is the self-hosted, non-WordPress build of it that this product ships as.

Cyber Essentials

A UK government-backed cybersecurity certification scheme for organizations. The product itself holds no Cyber Essentials certification; whether an operator's hosting environment meets that standard depends entirely on where and how it's hosted.

DSAR (Data Subject Access Request)

A request from an individual to see what personal data an organization holds about them. Conversation lookup in My Chat Assistant currently requires a visitor's session ID, not their name or email, which is worth knowing before committing to a specific DSAR process.

DSPT (Data Security and Protection Toolkit)

A UK health and social care self-assessment framework for data security. The product itself holds no DSPT certification; that depends on the operator's own hosting environment and practices.

Human Handover

Transferring a conversation from the chatbot to a live person, either automatically (when confidence drops or certain keywords are detected) or on request, via an always-available "Talk to a person" option.

Intent-Aware Retrieval

Recognizing what kind of question is being asked, a price question, a how-do-I question, a comparison, and widening the search to the vocabulary that kind of content is normally written in, rather than matching on exact keywords alone.

Knowledge Base

The indexed content My Chat Assistant draws answers from: a site's own pages plus any operator-authored Q&A entries, ingested from Markdown, HTML, JSON, or plain text.

LLM Prompt Copy

The control that appears at any point where a question would otherwise go to an AI model, when no AI provider is connected. It composes a prompt and hands it to the operator or visitor to copy and paste into a model of their own choosing, rather than the product making the call itself.

Multi-Channel Routing

Escalating a chat conversation out to another channel, such as an official WhatsApp Business thread or an email transcript to a support inbox, while preserving the conversation's context.

My Chat Assistant

A self-hosted, on-premise chatbot and knowledge-retrieval engine, powered by CQI Bot, built to run on standard PHP and SQLite without cloud dependencies or third-party tracking.

Non-Clinical Disclaimer

An optional, operator-enabled notice stating plainly that the assistant does not give medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Relevant for healthcare-adjacent sites that want to avoid implying clinical guidance.

On-Premise / Self-Hosted

Running entirely on infrastructure the operator controls, standard Linux web hosting, cPanel, or a VPS, rather than a third-party SaaS platform. Conversation logs, the search index, and visitor data live in their own install, not inside a shared, external database.

PII (Personally Identifiable Information)

Information that could identify a specific person, such as an email address, a phone number, a national insurance or NHS number, a date of birth, or a payment card number.

PII Redaction

Automatically stripping common personal identifiers, an email address, a phone number, a UK National Insurance number, a UK NHS number, and a date of birth, from a message before it's stored, on every message by default. A site's own content and an operator's own Q&A entries are untouched.

Privileged Communications

Legally protected exchanges, such as those with a solicitor, where confidentiality carries specific legal weight. In the product's default, retrieval-only mode, nothing is sent to a third party; if a generative AI provider is enabled, that provider's own data handling applies.

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

Composing a fluent answer from content that's already been retrieved and ranked (by BM25, in this product), rather than a model answering from its own general knowledge. My Chat Assistant treats this as optional: it only activates once an operator connects an AI provider, and even then the model is strictly grounded in what was already retrieved.

Retention Window

How long conversation logs are kept before being purged. Defaults to 90 days and can be adjusted, purged early, or exported by the operator.

Retrieval-Only Mode

The product's default operating mode: every answer comes directly from indexed site content or operator-authored Q&A pairs. Nothing is generated or invented, and no AI provider is called unless one has been connected.

Safeguarding Detection

Checking a visitor's message for safeguarding language before any answer is generated. A match skips content generation and returns a fixed, operator-reviewed response, with an offer to hand off to a person. It works from a defined keyword list, not a clinical or risk assessment of the person typing.

Session Storage

A browser storage mechanism, distinct from a cookie, used to hold a session id for the duration of a browser tab. It clears automatically when the tab closes and isn't sent to the server with every request the way a cookie is. My Chat Assistant uses this instead of cookies.

SQLite

A lightweight, file-based database engine. My Chat Assistant stores its search index and conversation logs in local SQLite files directly on the host server, with no external database server or ongoing database hosting cost.

TF-IDF

Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency: a classic information-retrieval technique for weighing how important a word is to a specific document relative to a whole collection. BM25, which My Chat Assistant uses, is a refinement of this scheme.

UK GDPR

The UK's data protection law governing how personal data is collected, stored, and processed. The product is built to support GDPR-conscious operation, retrieval-only by default, redaction of common identifiers, configurable retention, exportable and erasable records, but compliance for a specific deployment depends on how the operator configures and uses it, including their own legal basis for processing.

Uptime / High Availability

How reliably a service stays online and how it fails over if a server goes down. My Chat Assistant doesn't claim a specific uptime or failover guarantee; that depends on the operator's own hosting.

Voice Input

Letting a visitor speak a question into the chat widget using their device microphone, instead of typing it.

VPS (Virtual Private Server)

A virtualized server with dedicated resources, sitting between shared hosting and a fully dedicated physical machine. My Chat Assistant runs on a standard VPS without needing root access or a custom container setup.

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)

The standard used to judge whether a website or app is usable by people with disabilities. Automated testing (Lighthouse, built on the axe-core engine) has been run against the live product and currently passes clean; a full manual audit, including a screen reader pass, hasn't been completed, so full WCAG 2.1 AA conformance isn't currently claimed.

Widget Launcher

The small, always-visible button or bar that opens the chat window. It can be bound to a custom button, text link, or call-to-action elsewhere on the page.

Zero Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

A measure of how much a page unexpectedly shifts around as it loads. My Chat Assistant uses fixed positioning and pre-calculated container boundaries so the widget never causes the host page's content to jump.