Add a voice assistant to your storefront

Shoppers can talk to your storefront: ask what you sell, ask about a product, and be taken straight to the page. It runs on your own voice-provider account — ElevenLabs today — so you pay their per-minute rate directly. Niblr adds no markup, takes no cut, and never sends your API key to a shopper's browser. Set it up under Settings → Voice.

What can a shopper actually do with it?

They tap the voice button, speak, and the assistant answers out loud. Behind the scenes it can do exactly four things:

• Search your catalogue for what they describe
• Read one product's details — including its real, current price
• List what your store sells, by category
• Open a page for them, so they land on the product instead of being told where to find it

That's the whole surface. It's read-only by design: everything else is something the shopper does themselves.

What do I need before I start?

Two things:

1. The Growth plan. The voice assistant is a Growth capability, and unlike most paid features it's enforced during early access too. That's deliberate — every conversation spends real credit on your vendor account, so opening it to every tier now would mean taking it away later. You can still paste and save your key on a lower plan; it just stays switched off until you upgrade.
2. Your own ElevenLabs account, with an API key. Create one in ElevenLabs under Profile → API keys.

You do not need to build an agent yourself. Niblr creates one on your account, configured for your store.

How do I set it up?

1. Go to Settings → Voice in your admin.
2. Paste your ElevenLabs API key and press Save. Niblr provisions an agent on your ElevenLabs account, primed with your store name, your categories and your currency.
3. Press Test connection to confirm the key works. Two different failures get two different messages, because they need two different fixes: a rejected key means paste a different one, while a key that validates but can't reach agents means widen that key's scope in the ElevenLabs dashboard.
4. Tick Show the assistant on my storefront and save again.

The assistant reads your live catalogue, so it's worth having your products in reasonable shape first — it can only describe what's actually there.

What does it cost, and who pays?

You pay ElevenLabs directly, at whatever per-minute rate your plan with them carries. Niblr is never in the middle: no markup, no cut, and no visibility into what your conversations cost, because they happen on your account and not ours.

That also means Niblr cannot cap your spending. Set usage limits in your ElevenLabs dashboard, the same as you would for any other API you use. Check their current pricing on the ElevenLabs site — we deliberately don't reproduce their rates here, because they'd go stale.

This is the same arrangement as bringing your own payment gateway: your account, your keys, your relationship with the vendor.

Is my API key safe?

Your key is encrypted at rest and never reaches a shopper's browser.

When a shopper starts a conversation, their browser asks Niblr for a short-lived session token instead. That request must come from your own storefront and is rate-limited, and the token expires shortly after it's issued. Your key stays on the server the whole time.

Where does the assistant appear — and where doesn't it?

It appears on your storefront's content pages: the home page, product pages, category and custom pages.

It's fenced out of checkout and account entirely — the button doesn't render there at all. Checkout because nobody entering card details should have an agent listening or interrupting, and account because those pages show a shopper's own data, which the assistant has no tools to read and no business narrating.

The same boundary applies to where it can send someone. "Open a page for me" runs against a strict allowlist of your own product and page URLs; the cart, checkout, account and API paths are never valid destinations. Speech is easy to mishear, so anything not recognisably one of your own pages is refused rather than inspected.

What can't it do?

Stated plainly, because the assistant will tell a shopper the same thing if they ask:

• It can't touch the cart. Not add, not change, not remove.
• It can't take payment or complete checkout.
• It can't see a shopper's account, their order history, or anything personal about them.
• It can't change prices, apply discounts, or promise a delivery date.

It's also held to quoting prices only from a product it has just read — never from memory, never estimated, and never converted into another currency. If something isn't in your catalogue it says so rather than inventing a substitute.

Conversations are in English today.

My store changed — why is the assistant out of date?

Because the agent on your ElevenLabs account was configured with a snapshot of your store: its name and its category list.

Rename your store or add a category and Settings → Voice notices the drift and offers a Sync agent button. Press it to push the current details across. Without this you'd rename your store and never find out the assistant was still using the old name.

Why isn't the voice button showing up?

Work down this list:

• Is your plan Growth or above? The widget isn't shipped to the page at all below that.
• Did you tick "Show the assistant on my storefront"? Saving a key doesn't switch it on.
• Did provisioning fail? Settings → Voice shows the last error if it did.
• Are you on HTTPS? A page served over plain http renders no button, since microphone access won't work.
• Does the browser support microphone capture? If not, no button is rendered — a control that can't work is worse than no control.

Can I use a provider other than ElevenLabs?

Not yet, but the plumbing doesn't assume one. Voice providers are registered the same way payment gateways are — one adapter at a time, with no change to the settings page. If you use a different vendor, tell us which and we'll look at it.