Ask Fern Discord bot | Fern Documentation

Ask Fern is also available for Slack. See the Slack app documentation for setup instructions.

The Ask Fern Discord bot allows customers to ask questions about your products directly in Discord channels and receive AI-generated answers from your documentation database.

Fern stores all questions and answers from Discord interactions for analytics purposes.

Setup

Install the Ask Fern bot in your Discord server and configure it for your channels.

To install Ask Fern in your Discord server, you must have Manage Server permissions. This is set in Server Settings > People > Roles.

Enable Ask AI in your dashboard

Before installing the Discord bot, you need to enable Ask AI for your documentation site.

Go to your Fern Dashboard and enable Ask AI in the “Settings” tab of your domain. For more advanced configuration instructions, see the Ask Fern setup guide.

Get your unique install link

Use the API Explorer to get a unique Discord installation link for your organization.

You will need:

Your Fern token
Your domain without protocol or path (e.g., website.com, not https://website.com/docs)

You can alternatively use this cURL request:

$ curl -X POST "https://fai.buildwithfern.com/discord/install?domain=<YOUR_DOMAIN>" \
>      -H "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_FERN_TOKEN>"

Follow the URL returned in the integration_url response field.

Add to your server

You’ll be redirected to Discord to authorize the Ask Fern bot. Select the server where you want to add Ask Fern and click Authorize.

Configure channels

Once the bot is added to your server, use the /configure slash command in each channel where you want the bot to respond. Without this configuration, the bot won’t respond to messages in that channel.

Configuration

Customize the bot’s behavior to match your workflow needs.

Bot settings per channel

Use the /configure slash command in any channel to adjust the settings. This opens an interactive menu where you can configure:

Setting	Description
Response mode	Controls whether the bot responds only when directly mentioned with `@Ask Fern` (`mentions_only`) or automatically responds to questions while ignoring casual chat (`auto`).
Help role	Optionally select a role or user to tag when users click the “Ask for help” button on bot responses.

After selecting your preferences, click Save Configuration to apply the changes.

Customize the bot name

You can rename the bot to match your brand (example: “YourCompanyName Support”):

To rename your Bot, you must have Change Nickname permissions. This is set in Server Settings > People > Roles

Go to the Members List section at the top of the Discord server

Right click the AskFern bot and select “Change Nickname”

Enter your preferred bot name and click “Save”

Now, users will see your custom bot name instead of the default “Ask Fern” name.

Architecture

When a user asks Ask Fern a question in Discord, the bot receives the message and triggers Fern’s servers to search your documentation database and retrieve relevant context. Using that context, Ask Fern generates a response and replies in a thread.