What is Desk, and how is it related to ModelRiver?
Updated
Desk is an open-source customer support app built on ModelRiver. It gives you an AI chat widget that answers from your own help articles, a public help center, and a dashboard where your team takes over when a person is needed. You run it on your own server.
What's included?#
- Chat widget: answers questions from your articles, links its sources and streams replies as they're written. Embed it on any site.
- Help center: your articles, organized into sections, searchable, with "Was this helpful?" votes.
- Team dashboard: live conversations, human takeover, a knowledge base editor and insights such as questions the AI couldn't answer.
- Integrations: optional, read-only lookups in Shopify, Stripe, Cal.com or your own API, so the assistant can answer "where's my order?"
How does Desk use ModelRiver?#
ModelRiver does the AI work behind the chat: it streams the answers, keeps the conversation history, and sends live updates to the widget and the dashboard. When your team replies, the AI sees those replies as part of the conversation. Because ModelRiver handles all of this, Desk itself stays small and easy to run.
Do I need to know ModelRiver to use Desk?#
Only a little. You need a ModelRiver account and API key, and you import one ready-made workflow (support_assistant) and publish it Live. Desk takes care of the rest.