Thinker - AI Teaching Assistant

Equip your course with Thinker, Thinkific's AI Teaching Assistant - a powerful, 24/7 AI-powered assistant ready to support your learners and boost engagement.

Available with Thinkific Plus

Connect with our team to upgrade to Plus

About This Feature

Thinker is your always-on course companion, designed to answer questions about your content, support your customers as they learn, and save you from replying to the same questions - helping you grow revenue without needing to expand your team.

Thinker provides your users a quick and reliable conversational experience, powered by your learning content. Embedded directly in your Course Player, it delivers timely, relevant answers leveraging your existing content. 

You can customize Thinker with a unique name, icon, and inject its language with your brand’s voice and tone. You control which of your courses it can reference and include in its responses to your users, and measure its engagement and usefulness with analytics and insight tracking.

In addition to using your course lessons, Thinker can also leverage general reference documents that you upload as PDFs. These documents don’t need to be part of a specific course and are ideal for things like support documentation, policies, or reference guides. Thinker will use the content from these PDFs to provide richer, more accurate answers to your learners, while keeping the original documents private.

Thinker is available to customers on Plus plans. Every Thinkific Plus plan includes a monthly allotment of Thinker credits that reset at the start of each month. Learn more about pricing below.

Looking for tips on launching Thinker? Check out our guide: Launching Thinker: Tips, Prompts, and Best Practices

How It Works

Thinker appears as a button in the Course Player for any course that it has been trained on. Clicking the button opens the chat interface alongside the course content, similar to Discussions. Learners can also access it on the Thinkific or your Branded mobile app.

From the chat window, learners can ask questions and get helpful, sourced responses in your tone of voice, making them feel seen and supported. Every response from Thinker includes a thumbs up/thumbs down option - this feedback is tracked in the analytics, showing you the total number of positive and negative responses to help gauge Thinker's effectiveness.

Important Considerations

• Thinker, AI Teaching Assistant, is available to customers on Plus plans. Every Thinkific Plus plan includes a monthly allotment of Thinker credits that reset at the start of each month. If you're already a Plus customer, reach out to your dedicated Customer Success Manager to learn more. Curious, but not yet on Plus? Discover how Plus can supercharge your business growth.
• Thinker can use content from published courses (including draft content within those courses) as well as PDF documents that you upload directly to Thinker as general reference material.
• When using uploaded PDFs as references:
  • Uploaded PDFs are private by default. Learners will not see, download, or be directly linked to these documents from the Thinker chat. Instead, Thinker uses them behind the scenes to improve the quality and completeness of its answers.
  • Uploaded PDFs are not tied to a specific course. They act as global content, so Thinker can use them to answer questions from any learner it’s enabled for—regardless of which course the learner is currently viewing.
  • Use uploaded PDFs for general or support-type resources that don’t fit neatly into your course structure (for example, help center articles, process documentation, or company policies).
  • This feature is currently limited to PDF files. Other file types (such as Word documents, spreadsheets, videos, etc.) are not yet supported. Currently only text content from PDF files will be index. Any photos, diagrams, or other graphic content within these files will be ignored.
• At this time, Thinker is enabled on a per-course basis and cannot be restricted to a specific group of learners within that course. It also operates with a global scope, meaning it will draw answers from all courses it has been trained on, regardless of which course the learner is currently on.
• Thinker is available on the new course builder - if your site was created on or after January 28, 2026, you will have access to this feature. Learn more: Introducing Thinkific's New Course Builder

Setting Up Thinker

To access Thinker from the Admin Dashboard:

1. Go to Products
2. Select Teaching Assistant

When setting up Thinker for the first time, you will see a Set up Thinker button - clicking this will enable Thinker and will take you to its settings, where you can customize different aspects of Thinker, including the voice and tone as well as the courses that it will have access to.

To customize Thinker, simply click on one of the following tabs to go into the settings:

Here, you can define the characteristics of Thinker:

• Name: The unique name for Thinker that is displayed in the chat.
• Profile image: The image for Thinker that is displayed in the chat.
• Greeting message: The first message that Thinker will send to the learner when they open the chat window.
• Voice and tone: Guidance that will inform the conversation style between Thinker and learners, such as formality and personality.
• Button label: The text displayed on the button that opens the chat.
• Channel window heading: The name that is displayed at the top of the chat.
• Monthly per-learner responses: Set the number of responses Thinker can send per learner, per month.

After making any changes to Thinker's voice and style, click the Save button to save your changes.

First, set the courses that Thinker will have access to:

1. Click the dropdown and select a course
2. Click Sync

Only published courses will be available to select from the dropdown.

Then, select the Content use that you would like to set for Thinker:

• Use all synced content: Allows Thinker to reference any synced courses, even if the user is not enrolled in them.
• Match user access: Only allows Thinker to reference courses the user is enrolled in.

Once added, the course content will automatically begin syncing to Thinker, with the status of this being displayed under Status column, and will display a green Synced status once they are fully synced. 

If any new content is added to a course that Thinker has access to, you can ensure that Thinker will stay up to date by toggling on Auto-sync courses. Alternatively, you can also manually sync any courses:

1. Click the ellipsis (three dots) icon next to the course
2. Click Manually sync 

If you have important information that doesn’t belong in a specific course - like a support knowledge base, company policies, or onboarding guides - you can upload it as a PDF. When Thinker uses this content to answer learner questions, it will keep the original documents hidden, so learners only see the relevant answer, not the raw source. 

To upload a PDF:

1. Click Upload a PDF
2. Drag and drop your desired PDF (or browse and select a file from your device)
   Supported file types: .pdf (max file size 25 MB)

Publishing Thinker

Initially, Thinker will only be visible to admin users. After you have customized it to your liking and have added your desired courses for it to access, you can publish it to make it available for your learners!

To publish Thinker:

1. Click the Publish button in the top-right corner
2. Click Publish

And that's it! Thinker will now be available in the Course Player for your learners to interact with. You can also unpublish Thinker at any time by following the above steps and clicking Unpublish.

Previewing Thinker

If you'd like to see how Thinker will look from a learner's perspective before publishing it, you can do so by previewing it.

To preview Thinker, simply click on the Preview button in the top-right corner.

Global Thinker

Global Thinker is Thinkific's AI teaching assistant plugin that lives as a floating widget on the student dashboard. Once enabled, it gives learners access to an AI assistant across the entire site - not just inside a course. 

Communities, Checkout, and the new Learner Hub still do not support site scripts and therefore cannot host the widget at this time.

How Global Thinker Works

Before setting this up on your site, here's what you need to know about how Global Thinker behaves:

• Scope: Global Thinker is designed to support learners outside of the course experience. It's a site-wide, non-course-specific AI tool - but it's just as capable as the in-course version. It can provide course recommendations and do everything Thinker can do when situated inside the course player.
• Published state: Global Thinker respects the published state the same way the course player version does. If Thinker is unpublished, only admins will be able to see it - learners will not.
• Page availability: When activated, Global Thinker becomes available to all logged-in users on any page that supports site scripts. It cannot be activated inside Communities, Checkout, or the new Learner Hub - these areas do not support site scripts today.
• Logged-in users only: Global Thinker is not visible to anonymous users. Learners must be logged in to see and interact with the widget.
• No segment restrictions: Global Thinker is currently available to all logged-in learners and cannot be limited to specific segments. This is different from the course player version, where only learners with access to a specific course can interact with Thinker. 

Once set up, here's what learners get out of the box:

• Keyboard shortcuts: Cmd+K / Ctrl+K to open or close the assistant, and Esc to close it.
• Smart focus: The cursor automatically jumps to the chat input when the assistant opens, and returns to the floating button when closed.
• Dynamic branding: The assistant's avatar, name, and header are all pulled from the school's settings - no extra configuration needed.
• Placement: Configurable via position (8 presets) and offset. Defaults to bottom-right for the button style and bottom-center for the Ask Bar style.
• Full screen mode: Learners can expand the assistant to a full-screen view. The background is dimmed with a semi-transparent backdrop; clicking the backdrop exits fullscreen. The Ask Bar style opens directly into fullscreen - there's no intermediate popup state.
• Mobile behavior: Below 768px width, the popup and bar collapse to full viewport width minus a 16px gutter. Horizontal offset is ignored on mobile; vertical offset is preserved.

Global Thinker Setup

To add Global Thinker to your site, you will just need to add the Global Thinker code into your site footer code. Once added, you can then customize the widget to your liking!

First, copy the following one of the following code snippets, depending on the options you would like to use.

Minimal script (button style in bottom-right position on page):

<!-- Embedding global Thinker -->
<script
  src="/ai-agent/embed"
  onload="ThinkificTeachingAssistant.load()"
></script>

Full script with all options:

<script
  src="/ai-agent/embed"
  onload="ThinkificTeachingAssistant.load({
    widgetStyle: 'button',              // 'button' (default) | 'bar'
    position: 'bottom-right',           // see position presets below
    offset: { x: 0, y: 0 },             // px nudge from the anchored edges
    barWidth: 480,                      // px — bar style only
    showInCoursePlayer: false           // defaults to false
  })"
></script>

Then, navigate to your site settings and paste the snippet into your site footer code:

1. From the Admin Dashboard, go to Settings
2. Select the Code & analytics tab
3. Select Site footer code

Once saved, the Thinker widget will appear as a floating button in the bottom-right corner of the learner-facing site.

Optional Global Thinker Settings

When Global Thinker is added to your site, you also have a few customization options for the widget. Expand the following sections to learn more.

ThinkificTeachingAssistant.load({
  widgetStyle: 'bar'
})

top-left      top-center      top-right
center-left                   center-right
bottom-left   bottom-center   bottom-right

ThinkificTeachingAssistant.load({
  widgetStyle: 'bar',
  position: 'bottom-center'
})

ThinkificTeachingAssistant.load({
  position: 'bottom-right',
  offset: { x: 24, y: 24 }   // 24px in from right edge, 24px up from bottom
})

ThinkificTeachingAssistant.load({
  widgetStyle: 'bar',
  barWidth: 600
})

ThinkificTeachingAssistant.load({
  showInCoursePlayer: true
})

Thinker Analytics

Thinker has its own dedicated analytics, providing insights into its usage and effective with your learners, such as total users, number of responses, estimated hours saved, and most active learners. 

The analytics page also includes a detailed message history, allowing you to review all conversations or filter them by a specific user to see their interactions, as well as view which responses your learners marked as thumbs up or thumbs down. You will also see the details of where your learners are asking Thinker questions - including the location and URL - within your message history.

To access Thinker analytics:

1. From your Admin Dashboard, select to Analytics
2. Select Engagement
3. Select the Thinker tab

Learn more about Thinkific's analytics dashboards: Thinkific Analytics: Engagement Dashboards.

Thinker Pricing

Thinker is available to customers on Plus plans. Every Thinkific Plus plan includes a monthly allotment of Thinker credits that reset at the start of each month. Unused credits do not roll over.

Each time Thinker answers a learner’s question, one credit is used. For example, if a learner asks Thinker, “Where can I find the workbook?” and Thinker replies with the answer, that uses one credit. As learners receive responses from Thinker, credits are consumed and reflected in your admin dashboard from the Thinker Analytics table.

If you have reached your monthly credit allotment, reach out to your Customer Success Manager to explore your options.

Frequently Asked Questions

For all frequently asked questions about this feature, check out our AI Teaching Assistant FAQ.

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