Streamlining Workflows with Drupal AI Modules

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AI is shaking things up in the content world. If you’re using Drupal, you’re in luck because there are some amazing AI tools at your fingertips that can help you create better content, automate tedious tasks and even give your users a more personalized experience. From content generation to improving site moderation and keeping your users engaged with chatbots, Drupal’s AI modules make it possible.

In this post, we’re breaking down the top nine Drupal AI Modules that can help you do more with less effort. We’ll also show you how to hook up OpenAI to your Drupal site to automate content creation, streamline editorial workflows and more.

Top 9 Drupal AI modules

1. Drupal AI

Drupal AI is a flexible framework that connects your site to powerful AI services like OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face through a pluggable API. Editors can use AI to generate content, suggest improvements, auto-translate text or even create images directly within the content editor. Site builders can automate tasks like generating alt text, summarizing content or tagging articles with smart automators. 

The module also supports AI chatbots, semantic search via vector databases and a growing ecosystem of provider plugins. With a built-in prompt explorer, configurable permissions and UI integration with CKEditor, it’s highly usable for both developers and content teams. Backed by the Drupal community and included in the upcoming Starshot (now Drupal CMS) distribution, Drupal AI is quickly becoming the standard for adding AI to Drupal sites – whether for productivity, personalization or user engagement.

2. Chatbot API

Chatbot API is a middleware that lets a Drupal site talk to external conversational-AI platforms (Alexa, Google Dialogflow, Wit.ai, etc.) through a single, common layer.

Instead of building separate integrations for each platform, developers can centralize their logic within Drupal and connect to external services using drivers. This streamlines headless or decoupled content delivery, making Drupal’s structured content, like nodes, terms and products, readily available to conversational interfaces without additional APIs. It also ensures a consistent user experience by enforcing the same permissions, personalization and business rules already present on the main site.

3. CKEditor 5

CKEditor 5 is the default rich text editor in Drupal that now brings powerful AI capabilities to significantly enhance the content creation experience. Integrated directly into the editing interface, its AI Assistant helps users generate, summarize, rewrite or improve content using natural language processing. This tool streamlines writing tasks, making it easier and faster for users to create high-quality content without switching to external platforms.

The editor also features intelligent productivity tools like slash commands, enabling users to quickly access functions such as content summarization or rewriting with simple text commands. Additionally, WProofreader provides AI-enhanced grammar and spell checking, offering multilingual support, autocorrect and context-aware suggestions to improve the clarity and professionalism of written content.

4. Augmentor AI

Augmentor AI serves as a framework that connects Drupal with various external AI platforms, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google Cloud Vision, Google Speech-to-Text, NLP Cloud and AWS AI services. This allows Drupal users to leverage advanced AI features like text generation, image analysis, speech processing and natural language classification within their content management workflows.

Augmentor AI includes a plug-in system for managing different AI services, tools for customizing how AI responses are used and CKEditor integration so editors can access AI features directly from the content editor toolbar. It also offers various field widgets: a default widget that returns a single best response, a select widget that provides multiple AI-generated options and a tags widget ideal for taxonomy or classification fields. Additionally, this module can map a single AI response to multiple Drupal fields, enabling more complex and dynamic content updates.

5. AI Agents

The AI Agents module enables you to manage Drupal sites through conversational interfaces rather than manual configuration. This makes site building and configuration more accessible and efficient. Users can interact with Drupal using natural language commands, which are interpreted by AI agents that carry out tasks like creating content types, fields and taxonomies.

6. Content AI

Content AI assists content creators and site administrators in generating high-quality SEO metadata (such as page titles, descriptions and keywords) based on existing content. It also provides AI-driven translation capabilities, allowing for multilingual support with automatic content translation that is saved as a draft for editorial review. It’s currently in early development and works by integrating artificial intelligence into website content management by leveraging OpenAI’s language models.

To function properly, Content AI depends on several other Drupal modules: 

  • The OpenAI module connects to the OpenAI API and powers the AI features. 
  • The Metatag module allows SEO-related fields to be filled automatically.
  • The Workflows module and the Content Moderation module manage the publication flow, which is especially important for translated content.

Users must configure each of these elements manually, including setting up meta fields in content types, defining workflows and selecting languages.

7. OpenAI / ChatGPT Integration

The OpenAI / ChatGPT Integration module is a comprehensive toolset that brings the power of AI into Drupal websites. It enables site administrators, content editors and developers to integrate services from OpenAI – such as ChatGPT, GPT-4, DALL·E, Whisper and others – directly into their content workflows. With this module, users can generate and rewrite text, summarize content, suggest taxonomy tags, create images from text prompts and even analyze audio using speech-to-text capabilities.

This module is part of a broader AI initiative in Drupal and is especially valuable for teams that produce large amounts of content. Developers can also use the module to build AI-powered workflows, personalize content delivery and add intelligent features without needing separate infrastructure like Elasticsearch or external APIs.

8. Automatic Alternative Text

The Automatic Alternative Text module uses artificial intelligence to automatically generate descriptive alternative text (alt text) for images when none is provided. It integrates with services like Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services and Alttext.ai to analyze images and return a human-readable description. This improves web accessibility, especially for users who rely on screen readers.

This module is especially useful for user-generated content platforms like intranets, forums or community portals, where users often skip adding alt text. It’s a practically beneficial tool for enhancing accessibility at scale.

9. Search API Solr NLP

Search API Solr NLP enhances the capabilities of the existing Search API Solr module by integrating Apache OpenNLP, a natural language processing library. It enables more advanced and linguistically-aware search indexing by allowing Solr to analyze and extract parts of speech, such as nouns, from content. These extracted elements can then be stored as new field types in the Solr index, making it easier to build features like smarter autocomplete, spellcheck or more relevant search filtering.

The module is particularly useful for websites that rely on powerful, accurate search functionality, like documentation portals, e-commerce platforms or multilingual sites, where understanding the context of content improves the user experience.

Step-by-step guide to connecting OpenAI to your Drupal site

Now, let’s get hands-on and walk you through the process of integrating OpenAI with your Drupal site so you can harness the power of tools like ChatGPT to generate content, respond to user queries and even enhance your editorial workflow.

First things first, you need to get an API key from OpenAI:

  1. Sign up for an account on OpenAI's website.
  2. Once you're signed in, navigate to the API section and create an API key.
  3. Copy the API key; you’ll need it later for your Drupal integration.
  4. Go to Settings in the left-hand menu and copy your Organization ID (recommended over using the organization name), which you’ll also need later for your Drupal integration.

Then, you’ll need the OpenAI module for Drupal. Install it via Composer using this command:

composer require drupal/openai

Once installed, go to OpenAI’s settings in Drupal, paste your OpenAI API key in the "API Key" field and enter your Organization ID in the "Organization ID" field.

You can then:

  • Explore available submodules such as OpenAI ChatGPT, OpenAI CKEditor Integration, OpenAI Content Tools and OpenAI Prompt.
  • Choose between GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4 or GPT-4o depending on your needs.
  • Adjust response creativity (lower values for focused responses, higher for creative output).
  • Set maximum response length to control output size.
  • Customize how ChatGPT responds to your prompts.

Content creation tools: OpenAI/ChatGPT and OpenAI Content Tools

Now that you've connected OpenAI to your Drupal site, let's take a closer look at how you can use the OpenAI / ChatGPT and OpenAI Content Tools submodules to streamline your content creation process.

OpenAI ChatGPT provides a dedicated interface for interacting with ChatGPT directly from your Drupal admin dashboard. It creates a form-based interface that allows you to communicate with OpenAI's ChatGPT API endpoint, making it an invaluable tool for content creation, brainstorming and testing AI-powered functionality.

The interface operates in real-time, meaning you simply type your prompt in the input field and wait for ChatGPT to generate and display its response. This immediate feedback loop makes it excellent for iterative content development and idea exploration.

Meanwhile, the OpenAI Content Tools submodule integrates AI-powered assistance directly into Drupal's content editing workflows, offering

  • Text analysis and content moderation to ensure compliance with OpenAI policies.
  • Tone adjustment capabilities that can modify content to be more friendly, professional or helpful.
  • Content summarization for creating concise versions of longer texts.
  • Title suggestion generation based on content analysis.
  • Taxonomy term suggestions to improve content categorization.

Implementing AI chatbots and assistants for user engagement

AI chatbots can respond instantly to user queries, provide 24/7 support and even handle multiple conversations at once – something a human support team can’t always manage. This means users don’t have to wait for answers. They can receive immediate responses to their questions and get personalized recommendations, thereby enhancing their user experience and engagement.

In general, to integrate an AI chatbot into your Drupal site, you’ll need to:

  1. Choose a chatbot platform. You can use the Chatbot API module that we mentioned earlier or go for an easier-to-use one like Dialogflow. Select the module that aligns most with your site’s needs.
  2. Install the chatbot module on your site.
  3. Configure the chatbot by inputting your chatbot platform’s API credentials (e.g., API keys) and customizing the chatbot’s behavior.
  4. Add the chatbot to your site. Depending on the platform, this may be as simple as pasting a snippet of code into your Drupal theme or adding a widget block. Most chatbot platforms provide an easy-to-use integration process that ensures the chatbot appears in the right spot on your site (typically in the bottom-right corner).

Why hosting matters: Infrastructure requirements for optimal AI performance

When it comes to powering an AI-driven Drupal site, having the right hosting infrastructure is essential to ensure smooth performance, reliability and scalability. AI tools, especially those that rely on real-time data processing, can put a heavy load on your server. To make sure your site stays responsive and delivers a seamless experience, you need a powerful hosting platform that can handle the demands of AI integration without compromising on speed or uptime.

Let’s dive into why hosting is so important for AI performance and how Pantheon’s optimized platform can help you get the most out of your AI-powered Drupal site:

  • Scalability: Imagine hundreds or thousands of users interacting with AI-driven tools at the same time – this can overwhelm a server that’s not equipped to scale. Thankfully, Pantheon can automatically scale to meet the demands of high-traffic periods.
  • Speed and responsiveness: AI tools like chatbots or content generation rely on real-time data processing. To ensure fast, smooth interactions, low-latency hosting is crucial. That’s why Pantheon provides a Global CDN (content delivery network) and server-side caching that ensure your site loads quickly and remains responsive, no matter where your users are located.
  • Developer tools: AI integration often involves complex configurations and custom development. Having access to the right developer tools is key to ensuring that your AI modules are properly integrated and performing at their best. With Pantheon, you get a suite of developer-friendly tools, including Git-based workflows, Dev, Test, Live environments and Multidev. These tools allow developers to easily test, debug and deploy AI features without disrupting the live site. Plus, Pantheon’s Terminus CLI enables easy management of your infrastructure directly from the command line.

As you can see, with scalable, secure and high-performance infrastructure, Pantheon helps you get the most out of your AI-powered features without worrying about downtime, speed or performance issues.

Scale your AI-powered Drupal site with Pantheon’s optimized platform

By integrating AI modules like OpenAI for content generation, chatbots for user engagement and personalization for tailored experiences, you can elevate your Drupal site to new heights. However, to truly unlock the full potential of AI, your site needs the right infrastructure – one that can handle the demands of AI-driven features without compromising on performance, security or scalability.

With Pantheon’s scalable infrastructure, Global CDN, enterprise-level security and modern developer tools, Pantheon provides the perfect environment for hosting your AI-powered Drupal site. Whether you’re just getting started with AI or scaling up to accommodate more complex features, Pantheon ensures that your site performs flawlessly every time.

Now is the time to scale your AI-driven Drupal site with confidence and take your content and user engagement to the next level.

Get started with Pantheon today and experience optimized performance, effortless scaling and unbeatable support!

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