Deskbell documentation

Deskbell is an open-source answer engine you run on your own servers. It reads your documentation, embeds on your site as a widget, and answers visitors' questions from that content, citing the pages each answer came from. When your documentation does not cover a question, it says so instead of inventing an answer.

You need Docker and an API key for a model provider. Nothing else is required, and no support conversation leaves your infrastructure.

What it does

Point Deskbell at a documentation site. It crawls the pages, splits them into chunks, embeds each chunk, and stores everything in Postgres. When a visitor asks a question, it retrieves the closest chunks, sends them to a model as context, and streams back an answer with the source pages listed underneath. Questions the docs cannot answer can be answered in writing from the dashboard; a written answer is indexed like a page and cited as one. A visitor marking an answer down can reach a Slack channel or your own endpoint the moment it happens (Notifications), and every unanswered question lands on the Gaps page, grouped by meaning.

Four things are worth knowing before you install anything.

Every answer names its sources. The model is asked which of the retrieved chunks it actually used, and only those become citations. An answer built on two pages shows two sources rather than the eight that retrieval happened to return.

It refuses. When retrieval finds nothing that answers the question, Deskbell says the documentation does not cover it. Refusals are recorded with the evidence that was retrieved, so you can see what someone asked and why it could not be answered.

Nothing is tied to a vendor. The chat and embedding models are provider/model strings: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, a local model through Ollama, or anything OpenAI-compatible. The search index is pgvector inside Postgres by default, or a Weaviate cluster you already run, behind one interface. Your model, your database, your servers.

The widget is yours. Restyle it from the dashboard, from the embed code, or with CSS tokens, ::part() rules and slots for your own markup, until it looks like part of your product. If a widget is not the shape you want, the SDK and the HTTP API let you build your own UI on the same server and the same rules.

What it is not

Deskbell is not a helpdesk. It has no inbox, no ticket queue and no agent seats, and it is not going to grow them. It sits on top of whichever helpdesk you already run, so adopting it does not mean migrating anything.

It answers, cites and refuses. Through actions it can also look up a visitor's own data and act for them, using tools you expose over MCP: every tool is off until you allow it, and a tool you mark as needing confirmation runs only after the visitor confirms a card.

Where to go next

Start with the Quickstart if you want it running. Read How it works first if you want to know what you are running before you run it.