[00:00:21] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 471 entitled Miriam Schwab discusses Angie AI and Elementor's future in WordPress. And it was published on Thursday the 11th, June, 2026.
My name's Nathan Wrigley and a few bits of housekeeping just before we begin.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Miriam Schwab. Miriam has been on the podcast several times before. She's worked independently in her own ventures, and more recently has been working with Elementor. And today she's talking to us about Angie AI, which is something that they've recently launched.
You can probably tell by the name of the product that it has got something to do with AI. And so we talk about exactly what it does, how it works, how it is bound very tightly with Elementor, but it can also be used in non Elementor scenarios as well.
So we find out why they built it, what functionality and use cases Angie has. The growing subscriber count. Already they're onto 30,000 users, which is pretty amazing. How it works, how it generates code, how it's portable, how the relationship between Angie and Elementor is going to continue over time, and how the human in the loop in this scenario is still very, very much at the fore.
There's loads of interesting stuff in here and I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast once more by Miriam Schwab. Hello.
[00:02:57] Miriam Schwab: Hello?
[00:02:58] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to have you with us again. I don't know how many times you've been on this podcast.
I reckon it's, I reckon it's more than I can count on one hand. Anyway, it's something along those lines.
[00:03:07] Miriam Schwab: Yeah, I can't remember, but I would definitely say I'm a repeat
[00:03:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yes, and I love it. I love the fact that you keep coming back.
[00:03:13] Miriam Schwab: Thank you.
[00:03:14] Nathan Wrigley: lovely. Yeah, you're very welcome. I, guess one of the reasons for that is you've done so much, you haven't just stayed, in one place. We probably had you on when you were doing Stratec and all of those kind of things in your past.
But now, we're now working for Elemental. That company's not exactly standing still either. New products, new initiatives all over the place. For anybody that doesn't know you, do you wanna just very quick little potted bio about you and what you've done in the WordPress space before we press on?
[00:03:44] Miriam Schwab: Okay. So I've been in the WordPress space for over 20 years. I started out just building sites on my own. Then it developed into an agency, did that for 13 years, building custom WordPress solutions for companies and organisations. Sold the agency, founded a startup called strati, which offered a solution for deploying WordPress sites in a static architecture for security, scalability, et cetera, and stability.
And did that for a number of years. And that company, strata was acquired by Elementary in June, 2022. So I'm almost four years at elementary, which I can't believe it's a long time. I had never been like an employee before joining Elementary. I was always
[00:04:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's interesting.
[00:04:28] Miriam Schwab: I was an employee for two years in a part-time job, like when I was in university or just finished university.
But that was a million years ago. Like it was like for 20 years I had been the founder and the CEO of the companies. And then, so I've been here for almost four years, and my position here is head of WordPress. So I represent Elementor and, vis-a-vis the WordPress community and engage with the WordPress community.
And it means a lot of things. It's quite a dynamic and not boring role, which works really well.
[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: So just, I'm gonna go in, I'm gonna segue into that a little bit, if that's all right. Are you a good employee? And I don't mean like that objectively. What I mean is, did you, that was a bad question. what, what I meant was did you transition into being an employee? was that a whole, oh my goodness, people are telling me what to do kind of thing?
Or did you just slide into that? Oh, thank goodness somebody's telling me what to do. It doesn't have to be me figuring it out every minute of every day.
[00:05:27] Miriam Schwab: So I struggled with being an employee for the first months that I was here, less because people were telling me what to do. I'm very fortunate that. My role involves discussion, but not commanding. But also I think in general, elementary is not that type of company. Like generally when there's a direction, there's discussion around it.
So everyone's on board. It's not you must do this, you must do that. but it was hard for me because I didn't, I thought that if I'm an employee, then I have to like just be a toe the line type of person, and I need to stay in my own lane. But like having been the CEO of companies, I, see things like from a much broader context, and I would see things that were being done here, and I'd always have feedback.
I have a, I'm a very, I have a lot of opinions about things, and I was like, but can I tell them that I think that this could be done better? And who am I? And what? And then I learned that I can, so that really helped. And at one point I was actually talking to my sister and brother-in-law about this, and I was like, I don't know, how do I handle this?
And he said something which I thought was really smart, he said, you need to learn to be an employee. It's like a skill. I was like, oh, first of all, I like learning new skills. This is a new challenge, so I'm gonna try to do that. and I'm gonna instead of fighting against it, I'm gonna try to like, do, see it from that perspective.
And so I did. And, I like my role because it's like a lot of the things that I loved about being a CEO, the like, relationship side of things. And I get to be involved in like innovation and ideas and create creativity and, all sorts of things like that. But I, not the CEO, so I don't have all of that responsibility on me.
so it actually suits me really well. But I had to go through like a bit of an internal journey to get to this point.
[00:07:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. and that was what I was alluding to, really, did you have to basically learn to be an employee? And I, suppose the answer is yes. Some people might be able to make that adaption and other people may really struggle and figure, you know what, I'm better as a founder, I'll go off and be a founder again.
[00:07:36] Miriam Schwab: But I do give elementary,
[00:07:38] Nathan Wrigley: years later.
[00:07:40] Miriam Schwab: I just wanna give elementary lab credit for that because it's not just me in the picture. I am fortunate. I, my manager is the CEO and we work well together. And, in general, like they're great to, partner with as an employee. And I never thought of it that way, but anyways, good for them.
[00:07:58] Nathan Wrigley: No, that, that is a good call. And that, that, I suppose you've just demonstrated how good an employee you are. You've just, you've just big up your, your employer. yeah. Bravo.
[00:08:10] Miriam Schwab: it, I'm not.
[00:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, Elementor, everybody knows about Elementor. If they don't know about Elementor, stop listening.
Frankly, you don't belong here. there's just, there's so much news. It was the biggest thing for a decade or more. This page builder, which sort of took over the WordPress world now accounts for a, really significant proportion, not just of WordPress websites, but the web, I think you were saying prior to hitting record.
Was it 13 or something like
[00:08:41] Miriam Schwab: We now are at 13.2% of the web.
[00:08:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's nuts. That's literally nuts. So that's seven times Drupal or something like that, Wow. Wow. company that size though can't, rest on its laurels. And as you would imagine since the, since the advent of AI several years ago, Elementor has been trying to figure out different ways to get that stuff into its products, off product offerings.
So we've got stuff going on inside Elementor, not for this podcast episode, but you may be curious to know that there is a, another comp, another sort of product which is out there called Stick Light. We won't get into that now, but there is another Elementor product called Stick Light. You can Google that and no doubt, find something out about it.
But today the discussion is all about, Angie, which is spelled as you'd imagine A-N-G-I-E. You can find more about it on the elementor.com website, but the URL is long enough that it's gonna be quicker. If I just say, go to wp builds.com, search for this episode, and I'll put a link in there. Or you could just Google it, Angie.
For Angie AI for Elementor is probably the best way to describe it. What does it do? What is it?
[00:10:01] Miriam Schwab: like you said, with the way that everything is going, things need to become AI first, and that includes in the world of our world or the world of WordPress. and there's a lot of interesting initiatives and projects being created, and used in our ecosystem to, help people bring AI into their workflow.
Angie is one of them. There's a few things that are unique about Angie. So one is getting up and running with Angie is really simple. It's basically a matter of installing a plugin. The reason that matters is because we're still in the stage of ai, where hooking things together can be quite complicated and it's just not for everyone.
so this is a pretty seamless experience and you instal it and you get a chat experience right next to you in your WordPress admin that accompanies you in your work and it's ready to go and it's purpose built for WordPress. So general LMS are brilliant. I'm a big fan of Claude. Me and Claude have a very, close relationship, but
[00:11:06] Nathan Wrigley: I'm glad to hear it.
[00:11:07] Miriam Schwab: yeah.
Yeah, we besties. But, Claude is general and generic, and Angie is specifically for WordPress. So it understands your context of your own site. And also it is an expert, in WordPress and of course elementary, but not just elementary. It helps you manage. Your WordPress site in general as well.
yeah, and the sky's kind of the limit with Angie in terms of what you can do with it. A lot of our users are using it to generate elementary snippets, widgets, or also Gutenberg blocks. And these types of functionality have been like hard to achieve for a lot of people for all these years.
They were there, there was something that you could theoretically create for your site, but it involved development, which not everyone obviously is comfortable with. And now you can just chat to Angie and it will create this different functionality. And it's really fun seeing all the different things that people are creating with Angie.
Either things that answer like a very general type of need that aren't baked into WordPress, Elementor, but also very specific, use cases. That's the beauty of ai. So that's more or less about Angie.
[00:12:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So just ju I suppose one of the first questions I should ask is, you, employ heavily employed, I think there that you do not need to be an Elementor, owner. So you don't need the page builder in order to get the functionality to, work. So I suppose the follow up question to that would be, does it work better?
That may be a poorly worded question, but are there things that are specific to how Angie works, which just perfectly drop into, the elemental page builder? Or is it utterly agnostic? can you achieve just about everything outside of Element or that you could inside?
[00:12:59] Miriam Schwab: So first I'll just clarify, you do not have to have Elementor the page builder plugin installed in your site, but to get up and running with Angie, it needs to hook into the tokens that we're providing our users. And so you do need to connect to an elementary account, but it can be a free account. Like you could just sign up for a free elementary account and then you authenticate and then you're up and running At the moment, we're, providing it for free.
So there's no to, there's like a daily token limit of some kind, but you can get a lot done and then the next day the question is, and you know you don't have to
[00:13:29] Nathan Wrigley: so you need an element or.com account, but you don't need the element or page builder plugin
[00:13:34] Miriam Schwab: Or any products of ours. Like
[00:13:36] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:13:37] Miriam Schwab: you don't need it in terms of what Does Element are better? No, it does both. it knows WordPress really well, and it knows elementary really well, so you can use it for whatever you want. You can use it for creating page parts, but you can also use it for like admin related stuff like, I do, so we started doing this weekly live, demo.
It's on Tuesdays at 4:00 PM ce St time, whatever that means. people should tune in if they're interested, but in each live webinar we do, we demo some functionality. So just an example of general WordPress functionality that I showed, 'cause something simple but people use plugins for it right now is adding a duplicate post.
But link to your posts. I just asked Angie to do it and I now have a duplicate post thing there, and I don't need plugins for that. So anything you can think of that can help improve your workflow, create greater efficiency, et cetera. Like you can try it with Angie.
[00:14:38] Nathan Wrigley: right. So from what you've just described, then this is more a case of, you, you open up the box, ask it to do a thing, and it can do that WordPress thing. So if for example, that you want, I dunno, a sidebar that has got all of your categories neatly displayed or something like that, and previously you maybe found a plugin for that or a developer or, went to Stack overflow and got lost over there.
now you just ask Angie to do it. Angie then spits out the code. Maybe that then is a plugin itself or something like that, but an Oh, okay. So that's a good point. Does all of it live inside of Angie or does it do things like spit out a plugin, which you would then instal here, there and everywhere? Or is it Yeah, you just run it all through Angie.
[00:15:22] Miriam Schwab: So it actually creates code snippets, which you can, so there's in Angie, there's an area called Code Snippets. And you go in there and you can see all your code snippets there, I guess like mini plugins. But one has that functionality in it, and you can see the code there. you can edit it, so you can either edit it manually, which who wants to do that anymore, but you can then click on it and edit with Angie.
let's say I created that duplicate, post, thing, but now I want it that link to stand out. I want it to be purple so I can then edit on top of what I've created and be like, Angie, I want this button to look unique or whatever. And it will create that. What's nice, and this is a new feature in Angie, is that if you've created a few versions of your snippet, then you have version control.
So you can go in and see all the versions and you can just roll back by going to a previous version. You'll be like, let's say Angie, I said, Angie, make this button stand out more. And it made it like ugly yellow. So I could just be like, nah. And then go back to the previous version. And the reason that's beneficial is that doing undo and AI is too fuzzy.
if you tell AI okay, everything you just did, it'll be like, where did I do what?
[00:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: Where's the boundary for the word on undo? I don't know. Let's,
[00:16:37] Miriam Schwab: that end,
[00:16:38] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
[00:16:39] Miriam Schwab: right? So this way it's very clear. It was like this prompt creative version one now the second prompt, creative version two and so on. So that's, a really
[00:16:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's a real, I love that UI then, because normally if you're in some sort of chat interface, basically in the same way that you get lost in Slack, because the, all, it just all ends up, somewhere in the ceiling, the chat goes up and up and you can't find the bit where at one time there was definitely a bit a month ago where I had this perfect version somehow I've messed it all up.
And now I just wanna go back to that. So it locks the code, the output code separately from the chat in effect. So you've got the, chat is going on over here and then the version control locks the final code into its little box, and then you can put that wherever you like. So in theory, I suppose you could just, or maybe you couldn't, can you then take that snippet and pop it into a different website?
Because does it just use core word pressy things or is it using other things, that make Angie special in some way?
[00:17:43] Miriam Schwab: So funny you should ask because we actually just released a feature related to that. So because the code is visible, you could theoretically copy it and paste it somewhere else and package it like in a plugin or whatever, which is fine. But we created what's we're calling a cloud library. So in Angie, I've created this nice little widget and I'm like, that is so useful.
I wanna be able to use it on other sites. I click put in cloud library, and now it's in this globally accessible area, like to me, the user. So now I have a second site or I'm like an agency and I, I created a testimonial widget and I really like it and I just wanna keep using it and then maybe tweak it on you site.
I put it in the cloud library and then I can pull it into every site, the A site have Angie installed, and then I can pull it in. And now I have it available to me there as well. So you can like, create like a whole collection of curated, customised, widgets that work for you and your customers if you have them or whatever.
[00:18:41] Nathan Wrigley: so if I use my, if I use my Elementor account and bind that to site A and then go to site B and use the same Elementor account, in effect, I'm just picking up like, Dropbox or something like that. I'm just picking up all of those things, dumping them somewhere else, and the, file system and what have you.
Is there available for me in a way that makes it easy? you file
[00:19:04] Miriam Schwab: really simple. It's just, you don't have to think about the files each, it's just a list of your widgets or code snippets or whatever it is, and you're just like, oh, duplicate button thingy. There it is. Pull it into my site. Now I have it here too.
[00:19:18] Nathan Wrigley: that's yeah, that's a nice, that's nicely architected. I like the sounds of that. Okay, so slightly controversial question, and it may be one that you don't wish to answer, in which case feel free. So there seems to be some sort of, okay. Rewind, Nathan, start this question again. I was working at Elementor five years ago, all eyes are on the page builder.
you're driving that forward, trying to get traction for all of that. And then along it, and then at some 0.3, four years ago, this tiny little thing of AI emerges and everybody starts to scratch their heads and think, how is this gonna affect what we do? And then pretty quickly in the web building space, we work out, oh, it can do a lot.
So I'm curious as to whether this is like a fork in the road for Elementor. do the two things, are they, do you get the feeling that they're gonna go off in separate, different directions? Or is there an idea that Angie will become more tightly bound with Elemental? Is Elemental moving more towards AI based products?
Not really a question specifically in there, but do you get the tenor of what I'm trying to say?
[00:20:29] Miriam Schwab: So Totally because not even five years ago, like two years ago when, I don't remember exactly when it was that, OpenAI launched, but I think it was in like September, 2023 or something like that. So we're talking about, we're not even at the three year mark. Before that, everyone thought things were going in a particular direction, right?
You couldn't even imagine how AI was going to impact what we were doing. And then OpenAI launched, and actually at elementary at that time, pretty quickly, the team was, the MA management was like, okay, we really need to figure out how AI is going to be part of what we're doing. And like very significant efforts were made to create initial AI tooling.
I think all of us, not just in WordPress, couldn't really see what, AI was capable of doing until like towards the end of 2025 when those newer models came out. And it just blew everyone's mind, right? And then suddenly everything opened up as an opportunity. But even before that, elementary was taking strides towards making sure that AI was part of what, a significant part of what we were doing.
But this world of AI is so chaotic that it's really hard to figure out exactly where you should be going. So everyone's making what I would even say is like their best guesses. It's not even it's like it's a guess where should, what are people going to want? Also, not only are we guessing the users, we don't, the users don't know what they want, right?
Like they know that there's ai. What do they want AI to do? It's really hard to nail that down. 'cause AI is so all capable. Where do we even start? So we're all trying to figure it out together. Where is elementary going with ai? Angie is very important, because on the one hand, interestingly, people still want to use WordPress and elementary, for many good reasons.
I think, the infrastructure and the, general structure of WordPress is very stable and solid. And so whether you're creating things manually or with ai, you know where it's going, what it's doing, it's portable, it's open source. There's no vendor lock-in. It's like it's all yours. It's still has those benefits.
There's issues with vibe coded tools. I don't know if you're following, but every few days there's some kind of announcement about this is breached and that is breached. And this has vulnerabilities because unlike with WordPress where there's a thousand eyes on it, checking security issues, including on elementary, everyone's just kind, just literally vibe coding their stuff and like hoping for the best.
And it's for longer term projects. WordPress has an advantage. so people still wanna use elementary and WordPress. like we discussed elementary's market share overall grew, which
[00:23:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's re
[00:23:25] Miriam Schwab: miracle,
[00:23:26] Nathan Wrigley: that is some kind of miracle
[00:23:28] Miriam Schwab: dunno.
[00:23:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:23:29] Miriam Schwab: So we need to address them, but everyone expects the AI experience in their products and rightfully And they want it to be magical and they want it to save them time. And nobody wants to be doing the frustrating, annoying stuff anymore. And they, they want those capabilities. Like everyone's getting the vibe coding world. So for, from elementary perspective, we need to, deliver on that.
And so I think you're gonna see a strong convergence, in elementary of basically elementary becoming an AI driven page builder. More and more like it's already there to a certain extent, but you're going to be able to do the bulk of your work through ai, and then tweak it yourself.
[00:24:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:24:10] Miriam Schwab: and what Angie does, this is an example of it.
When it creates a widget for you, like an elementary widget, it also creates controls in it. It doesn't just create the output has controls in it. So then you can go in and tweak the colours or the size. And people love that. They don't want it to just be one and done. They want to be able to then tweak it and control it themselves.
So that's what we're seeing so far. But who knows what will be,
[00:24:34] Nathan Wrigley: Do, you know what, do you know what, I think one of the things that has occurred to me a lot is, and, it goes back to the thing that we were talking about earlier, where the, piece of code, the snippet has been put into this box and it's version controlled. That's the, so whenever I deal with ai.
It's the revision bit that I, can't do. So it, so I ask it to do a thing, it achieves a thing, but it's a total black box. I have no idea what went on in the background. I just asked it to do a thing. And magically there's the thing. And that's brilliant. If it gets it right first time, like a hundred percent first time, and in the case of code, it's perfect.
There's no security problems, anything like that. But then when you get into the modifying bit, that feels to me where the page builder actually swings into being useful because, okay, we've got the page now, you want that bit purple? you know what, it's probably quicker to click on it with a mouse, highlight it and pick the purple in your colour palette than it is to say, hey, whatever ai, can you, can you make the third heading in the, in the hero section?
Can you make that purple? Oh, but make sure it's the correct purple. By the time I've done, I could have done it 12 times over with the GUI. And so I feel that maybe we're heading into a future where give it a first pass with the ai, maybe, have a couple of revisions, get it broadly how you like it, and then the user interface drops in and those familiar things like adding padding and margins and spacing and fonts.
I, I think that, to me, there's still a connection. there's still a really solid place for that. I dunno if you agree with that or if that's just hot air, but Yeah.
[00:26:22] Miriam Schwab: I do agree, I think, so AI is non-deterministic, right? So you give it like broad strokes, it takes those broad strokes, even if your prompt is like pretty specific, it's still like some kind of like broad stroke direction. And then AI tries to understand what you want and creates something based off of it.
And I don't know if you've tried to create the same thing more than once, but the output can be
[00:26:46] Nathan Wrigley: that. Yeah,
[00:26:48] Miriam Schwab: It's like with the same precise prompt, and you'll get two pretty different things. So that's great for when you're creating like the first, let's say 80% of a project. You're not gonna sit and code the whole thing, but then comes the tweaking part.
And that's where you do want to be deterministic. You do want that purple to be the right purple, and you do want the font size to be 13. And instead of having a whole conversation with AI about it, where it's getting better, but still it's, it is like time consuming. I feel like I spend so much time waiting for AI to respond to me.
like I wonder how
[00:27:23] Nathan Wrigley: progress bars in the nineties. Yeah.
[00:27:26] Miriam Schwab: like for every, let's say piece of project that I'm working on with ai, I seriously think that 30% of the time is me waiting for AI to give me some kind of output. So rather than that, at a certain point you just wanna click and get it done. And that's what we're seeing with our users as well.
so you get this hybrid approach, which I think can work for a lot of people.
[00:27:49] Nathan Wrigley: we're also lucky in that we're in a space where there is no metric of perfect, that there isn't a perfect website. There's an approximation of perfect, and there's the human element, which is, I don't like that font, and that's not the set of colours which appeals to me. And those, words are just the wrong set of words.
And so the AI can spit out its version, and I know we keep talking about the human in the loop. This is that perfect moment. and whether the industry will have to adapt because everything will basically be done in half the time or a quarter of the time. that's up for grabs who knows where that's going?
But I, I can't see with the way LLMs work at the moment, that there, there's no horizon at the moment where those kind of hallucinations are completely gone. And that a mere prompt can get you actually what you want. Sure enough, it's remarkable that it can get as close as it does, but in order to make it perfect, I think that's where the human, comes in the loop and curiously opens up the, opens up the possibility to people who in the past may have been just, I don't know, not predisposed to do their own website, because getting that first draught was a, real barrier.
And now they can do that bit with a few words. So anyway, there you go. Any thoughts on that or welcome?
[00:29:13] Miriam Schwab: I, something that I see when I'm using ai, not necessarily Angie, but let's say Claude, which is, a brilliant ai, you have to be an educated consumer when you're building something. Like you can't fully depend on AI to make the right decisions. I've built a few plugins with Claude, and I even had to build a website, my website actually, and it did, some things like, in a really dumb way.
if, as a WordPress professional, I'm like, I would obviously never do it that way. Now, the overall results were brilliant and saved me a tonne of time, and if it wasn't for Claude, I probably wouldn't have sat down and done that, even to test it out, but it just wasn't making the right decisions. That's where, so first of all, the human in the loop needs to be there to push AI in the right direction and be like, okay, that's really dumb. Can you not do it that way? Please do it according to best practises. But I, guess that's also where something like a, Angie will have a benefit because it's purpose built for WordPress.
It knows best practises, and it won't ideally, at least most of the time, do something that's like dumb. I always say AI is both brilliant and dumb. It really
[00:30:29] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, Definitely displays both of those characteristics. One minute, it's playing four d chess, and then the next minute it tells you that somebody who's long since dead is alive and is, okay. Fine. Yeah. Where, do you land? can I just pivot the conversation slightly?
So it sounds to me as if over there at Elementor you've maybe got some choices to make and nobody's imagining that this is easy stuff that you are having to grapple with, but AI's in the mix, you've got a success, a hugely successful product that you can't, afford to let that go because that's important.
But at the same time, you've got these diverse initiatives like Stick Light and Angie. How, does that sit inside the company? Like how are the staff being deployed in terms of, I don't know, 30% are now working on the AI side of things and the page builders getting new staff or just tell us behind the scenes what's going on.
[00:31:25] Miriam Schwab: So for elementary, the page builder and Angie, which is AI for WordPress as opposed to stick light's, a vibe coding tool. So it's like a different world. so, that's, their own team. But with regards to the, like WordPress oriented products, so we have the team that's dedicated to the page builder, and then we have a team that's dedicated to Angie, but rightfully those worlds are converging.
there's a lot of overlap and a lot of collaboration because in the end, Angie is built for WordPress, but also very much for Elementor, the page builder. So both products have to coordinate and work well together, and our users will see more and more, Angie capabilities being offered within the editor to help them, build things out.
at the moment it's two separate teams. It makes sense because the editor, we call it the editor, the page builder, needs like a lot of attention. It's just a, such a huge project product with a huge number of users, like 12 or 20 million. that's really important. But, and they can't be distract distracted by ai even though we all are distracted by ai.
So that's why there was the an, there's the Angie team, but I, like I said, it's like converging more and more because they're both essentially the same thing at the end of the day.
[00:33:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. you're evolving, basically. You're having to figure it out at the same time
[00:33:05] Miriam Schwab: Totally. Wow. It's really and the pace of everything in this AI era is so fast that every day we have to like, look at things essentially,
[00:33:19] Nathan Wrigley: Getting back to the, Angie side of things. So you mentioned that it's built to do things the WordPress way. I, think that maybe that wasn't the exact formulation of the words that you said, something along those lines. And if you are a, I know a casual user of ai, it may be that you just used to a text box and you type things in and outcomes, other stuff.
But obviously it would be nice to think that the stuff that was coming out of the AI in Angie's case was wrapping itself up in the, and I'm doing air quotes, the correct WordPress way. So just talk to us a little bit about, that. So what's going on in the background between me putting in a prompt, the ai, doing its magic, and then spitting back the things, what's, it been taught to do?
And probably more importantly, not to do, not, anything too specific, but just some guidance as to where it's pointed out, where it gets its intuitions, where it looks for its source of, truth and things like that.
[00:34:20] Miriam Schwab: So when you're in the chat, with Angie, it's accessing different resources, behind the scenes, which are, which includes like skills, like skills, which is a lot of information about how to do things properly and what not to do. And that also includes a lot of guardrails so that you can't accidentally destroy your site.
[00:34:46] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
[00:34:47] Miriam Schwab: So
[00:34:47] Nathan Wrigley: everything. Ignore all previous instructions.
[00:34:50] Miriam Schwab: Yeah, self-destructive five seconds. so, that's, so it's pulling from that type of information and that information is costly being improved. and of course because WordPress is, every site's unique and has its own thing, so we learn about compatibility issues and this and that.
So the LLM LLMs behind the scene actually, accesses a number of LLMs and chooses the best one for the task. there's like it's form of routing happening behind the scenes as well, which is cool. that kind of helps with that side of things that it's just taken care of for you. they just do, you just ask Angela to do things and it will choose ideally the best way to do it.
So, it's, based off of a lot of instructions. there's some, another interesting piece of functionality in Angie is that when you ask it to build you something, it starts thinking and then planning and building it. And as soon as it generates some of the code, it puts the site into a sandbox environment.
[00:35:52] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:35:53] Miriam Schwab: Yeah. So the front end users, anyone visiting the site won't know that this is what's happening, but it sandboxes that code so you can test it and see it, but in case there's something wrong with it, it won't affect the front of end of the site. And only once you feel good about it, do you publish it, and then it's available on the front end of the site or the back end of the site if it's like an admin related thing.
You can tell you're in that sandbox mode. 'cause this pink like, frame appears around the screen and it says, Angie, test mode. And it makes it clear for you.
[00:36:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so essentially it's like a, safe version, it's like safe mode on an operating system. It, we are, we're fairly confident that we've got this right, but just in case here's a version, which is a, not actually live, have a good look, poke around, and then when you're finally happy with it, you click the button and off you go.
That's a neat idea. Did you arrive, was that an, was that launched right at the beginning or was, there some terrible moments, some realisation? Oh, it really did delete everything.
[00:36:55] Miriam Schwab: the terrible moments happened early on when we didn't have of users, thank goodness. yeah, the idea was, it's twofold. One is practically there could be code that's created that's problematic, but it was actually more oriented towards comforting people because it's a very scary concept like coding lie on your live production site.
So this way it hopefully helps delays people's fears because it's sandboxing it and so it's not affecting the
[00:37:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no, that's a really neat idea. I love that. Does there, does a, an elemental.com account holder. Get, Angie, I know you said it was free, so we can talk about that in a moment, but if you are an elemental.com account holder, does the not free version of Angie come along for the ride, or is there like a separate payment structure subscription that you have to sign up for?
How, does all that work? And what, are you paying for? Is it credits or what?
[00:38:01] Miriam Schwab: at the moment, if you have what we, what's called Elementor one, that's like our new bundled, approach to our products. We have a lot of products. so
[00:38:12] Nathan Wrigley: you've got like a, the whole mon the full Monty thing now, have you?
[00:38:16] Miriam Schwab: yeah, and we call it element one. So it includes our accessibility product and our site mailer, which is like for good email deliverable deliverability, image optimizer. And we have some others that are coming out. and there might be something else I'm forgetting. But anyways, Angie is part of that.
The difference between Angie for elementary, one account holders and non account holders is that I mentioned there's like a daily limit of tokens on the free version. So you, when you have elementary one, you have a monthly allocation of tokens that you can use across all the products. And so you can continue, you don't get blocked from using Angie if like you run out of tokens.
You can just keep going.
[00:38:58] Nathan Wrigley: And is it possible to I don't know, let's say you're a, big agency and you've got dozens of sites, or this month is particularly busy, are you able to top those up or do you have to, I dunno if you run out, you have to wait until next month for them to top up
[00:39:10] Miriam Schwab: So we have Elementor one agency, which should do the job. I don't think we've rolled out like, topping up your tokens yet. in the meantime, the, token amounts to be sufficient for most people, but if we see more and more use, then yeah, I imagine we'll offer that as well.
[00:39:30] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. So hopefully, I think we've done a fairly good job of describing what Ange is and how it works and it's a chat in your WordPress website, which enables you to touch by the sounds of it, almost any part of WordPress. Not just the bit, the pixels on the page. you can create widgets and short codes and the stuff that, which traditionally might have been involved with a developer or something like that.
I'll put the link in the show notes again, but again, if you just wanna Google it, an G-A-N-G-I-E AI for WordPress, that's probably the best way. and you'll be able to discover more about it. Is there anything we missed? Was there any important topic that we, left on the editing room floor there.
[00:40:10] Miriam Schwab: we just hit 30,000 active instals on the repo, which we're excited about.
[00:40:14] Nathan Wrigley: oh, that's,
[00:40:15] Miriam Schwab: Yeah.
[00:40:16] Nathan Wrigley: you say that like it's nothing. So some people, dream of a 10th of that amount. That's amazing.
[00:40:24] Miriam Schwab: I have to say, it wasn't easy for us. you would think that we'd flip a switch and things just take off, but it took a long time to get to 10,000. But like we went, I think we got to 10,000 three or four weeks ago then 20,002 weeks ago, and now we reached 30,000. Like the, there's some kind of snowball effect that's happening, where the pace is really
[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: Isn't that interesting? I wonder what it
[00:40:46] Miriam Schwab: it is, the product was problematic in the early days and we appreciate everyone who was our Guinea pigs. We like Guinea pigs because they're very brave people who are willing to give things a try. I think, the product has really improved and that
[00:41:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You can put it down to that maturation. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:41:06] Miriam Schwab: it's just, AI can be, like we said, great and frustrating and it was, I think it was too often frustrating, but also I think there's an increasing awareness about Angie.
and so people are like willing to give it a try. these live webinars that we're doing are actually helping, like people are really excited to see real use cases and then it motivates them to try it. So anyways, I don't know. It's coming together and
[00:41:32] Nathan Wrigley: That's nice. Yeah. That's really, so Bravo 30,000 active instals at the moment. No doubt. By the time this podcast goes out though, you're like 300,000 or something like
[00:41:41] Miriam Schwab: I don't, so
[00:41:42] Nathan Wrigley: the way it rolls with you guys.
[00:41:45] Miriam Schwab: we'll see.
[00:41:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In which case, thank you so much for chatting to me about Angie, Miriam Schwab. Really appreciate it. Thank you.
[00:41:53] Miriam Schwab: Thank you. It's always nice talking to you. Thanks for having me
[00:41:56] Nathan Wrigley: very, you are too kind.
[00:41:57] Miriam Schwab: No, you.
[00:41:59] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, no. Oh, you hang up first.
Okay. That's all we've got time for today. Just a quick reminder, if you want to get your messages out in front of a WordPress specific audience, wpbuilds.com/advertise, or send me an email [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you and get your product or service noticed by a WordPress specific audience.
Okay, as is always the case, I'm gonna fade in some cheesy music. Say stay safe. You have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
