What a Skill is

Every Skill is a focused conversation with a real toolset behind it. It's bound to your site and nothing else, it knows what's already there — your characters, your recent articles, your categories and tags, your site's tagline — and it works in front of you: a live panel beside the conversation shows the character, article or page taking shape as it's built.

Skills are deliberately kept separate rather than merged into one all-knowing bot. Each one is a named front door with advice specific to its job, so you always know what you're about to change.

Character Skill — hire one author, or a whole masthead

Say "I need a science writer covering marine biology who posts twice a week," and the Character Skill creates the character, writes the description that becomes its voice, and sets the posting schedule.

Starting a whole publication? Ask for a cast. It proposes eight to twelve authors who between them cover your subject from genuinely different angles — different expertise, different voice, different reader, no two interchangeable — as real, plausible bylines rather than job titles. Nothing is written yet: you add, cut, swap or re-roll anyone, and re-propose until the roster is right. Only then does it create them, register their WordPress author accounts, and report exactly what happened to each one.

It doesn't just create — it trains. Keep chatting to refine a voice, adjust a beat, or dial in the research settings, and it updates the author on the fly. Ask for a test article and it drafts one as an unpublished preview, so you can read a real sample in that character's voice before a single word reaches your readers.

It also sets each author's article options — featured and in-body images, fact-checking, corrections — so "turn on fact-checking for the whole cast" is one sentence, not a dozen trips through a form.

Article Skill — write and refine a piece by chatting

Sometimes you want one specific piece, not a scheduled beat. Describe or paste a brief and an AI editor drafts the whole article — running the same research-and-illustrate pipeline your characters use. Every draft lands safely as a WordPress draft; nothing reaches a public page on its own.

Then keep working the piece in the same conversation: ask it to rewrite the body, run a fact-check, or add images — featured art or illustrations inside the body, each written with a real caption and alt text, and it can carry an existing caption forward when it swaps an image. When you're happy, tell it to publish. Only then does it go live.

Because it inherits your site's context, it knows which categories exist before it files the piece, instead of inventing new ones.

Categories & Tags Skill — organize the taxonomy by chat

Every growing site drifts: near-duplicate tags, categories nobody uses, one term spelled three ways. Ask the Categories & Tags Skill to audit it and it will tell you plainly what to merge, rename or retire — and then do it.

• Audit & suggest — see the whole taxonomy at once, and get category suggestions drawn from what you actually publish.
• Create, rename, merge, delete, prune — the housekeeping that's tedious in wp-admin, done in a sentence.
• Honest impact previews — WordPress's own term counts only count published posts, so a "2 post" category can really hold five. This one counts the real list, at any status, before it asks you.
• Destructive work is gated — deletes and merges need explicit confirmation, happen one term at a time, and refuse your site's default category. A merge moves every post before the old term is removed, so nothing is ever left stranded.

About Page Skill — the page every site needs and nobody writes

Your site ships with a published About page from day one. This Skill makes it yours: it reads your tagline, your categories and your author roster, drafts copy that actually describes the publication, and rewrites it as many times as you like. When the words are settled it can generate a header image to sit above the title.

See what else every Scike site ships with →

Activity Skill — turn an article into something readers can play

A quiz checks what a reader remembers. An activity lets them try the idea with their own hands: drag, build, balance, simulate — a small interactive piece or game that sits under the article and demonstrates what it explains.

Point the Activity Skill at a published article. It reads the piece, proposes two or three concepts with a suggested point value, and builds the one you pick. The draft runs live in the panel beside the conversation, exactly as a reader would see it, with its objectives ticking off as you play — and if something breaks, one click asks the Skill to fix it. Ask for changes until it's right.

Readers only ever see what you publish. Drafts stay drafts, and a published activity can be revised, unpublished or removed at any time. Every activity runs in a locked-down frame with no access to your site, your readers' accounts or the network, and its score is worked out on your server, not in the browser.

The Activity Skill is included with the Pro and Publisher plans.

Widget Skill — design, tune and place chat widgets

A widget is a small AI chat app on your site: a tutor, a game, a unit converter, a guide to your archive. Tell the Widget Skill what you want and it turns the idea into a finished design — title, icon, description, the instructions that decide how it behaves, the model, and which chat controls visitors get — and shows it to you before saving.

Then it test-plays the widget with the kinds of messages a real visitor would send, reads the replies critically, and makes one focused fix at a time until it behaves. Every test exchange appears in the panel beside the conversation. Switch on site search and the widget answers from your own published articles and links to the ones it used. When it's ready, the Skill puts it on a page — a new draft page or the end of an existing one — and turns off the model picker so visitors can't run up your bill on premium models.

Like one of the built-in widgets? The Skill copies it to your site as a starting point, so you can change the copy without touching the original.

Only you can drive them

A Skill can create authors, write to your live site and spend AI budget, so it is not something a stranger with a browser can reach. Every Skill requires an editor-level login on your own site, checked against your WordPress install at the moment you use it. The chat widgets your visitors talk to — including the ones the Widget Skill builds — run on a separate, deliberately powerless account that can't publish anything. And each Skill is wired to exactly one site — there is no field anywhere for pointing it at somebody else's.

Nothing is lost when you close the tab

Every Skill conversation, like every chat in Chat Studio, saves itself as you go. Come back tomorrow, reopen the thread, and keep going — or rename it, browse the ones before it, and delete the ones you're done with.