Crowly founder Vince walks through the full flow: upload content, shape the bot's identity, connect a Discord server, and watch it answer with timestamp citations to the exact moment in your source videos.

Note

What you'll build A text chatbot trained on your own videos, PDFs, or audio that answers in your writing style and cites timestamps back to the source material. Deployed in under five minutes, zero code.

Watch the walkthrough

Overview

Three phases end to end:

Upload content: train the bot on any source you already have.
Shape its identity: describe who the bot is, and Crowly expands that into a full system prompt.
Connect Discord: link your server and the bot is live.

The sections below mirror the video one for one, so you can skim the text or follow along frame by frame.

Step 1 · Upload content to train the bot

From the dashboard, open Upload. Crowly ingests every source you throw at it:

YouTube videos: paste the URL and transcription runs automatically.
PDFs: drag and drop. Extraction is near instant.
Audio files: mp3, wav, m4a. Transcribed and indexed.
Web pages: paste a URL to crawl.

Each source is chunked, embedded, and written to an isolated vector namespace keyed to your bot. Crowly shows a progress bar per source so you can tell at a glance when the knowledge base is ready to answer.

Tip

Mix sources for best results The strongest bots pull from multiple formats, like a creator's videos plus their written guide, or a coach's lesson library plus a PDF playbook. Crowly blends retrieval across formats and cites whichever passage it drew from.

Step 2 · Define the bot's identity

Open the Identity panel and describe the bot in one or two lines, like:

A gaming YouTuber and Valorant coach

Click Enhance. Crowly expands that seed into a full system prompt covering tone, areas of expertise, how to handle off topic questions, and what to do when it doesn't know something. Review it, tweak if needed, and save.

Tip

Start narrow A one line description enhanced by Crowly beats a long paragraph you wrote yourself. The enhancer is tuned to produce prompts that work well with retrieval.

Step 3 · Set name and avatar

Two cosmetic settings. Both matter for how your community perceives the bot:

Nickname: the display name the bot answers to in chat.
Avatar: a square image used as the Discord profile picture.

Important

Avatar dimensions Discord requires a roughly square image. Upload something at least 512 × 512 pixels. Tall or wide images will be rejected before the connection completes.

Step 4 · Connect to Discord

From the integrations panel:

Click Connect Discord.
Authorize CrowlyAI when Discord prompts you.
Pick the server where the bot should live.
Accept the OAuth scopes and confirm.

The bot appears in your server's member list within a few seconds. No bot hosting, no webhook wiring, no code.

Step 5 · Mention the bot and watch it answer

In any channel where the bot has permission to read:

text
@yourainame hi who are you?

Crowly does three things per reply:

Resolves the mention to your bot's knowledge base.
Searches the indexed content for passages relevant to the question.
Answers with plain text, and when the source was a video, includes clickable timestamps that jump straight to that moment.

That last point is what makes the experience feel different from a generic LLM: answers are grounded in your material, and users can verify every claim by clicking into the source.

Where to go next

Now that your first bot is live, the obvious follow ups are:

Grow the knowledge base: keep adding videos and PDFs. Crowly re-indexes incrementally.
Tune the reply style: experiment with the behavior and style profile settings to match your brand tone.
Publish to the web: one toggle gives the same bot a shareable /c/... URL your community can open without Discord.

Note

Support Questions while setting up? Reply to any message in the dashboard or email support@crowly.ai. We read every message.