Every so often someone at work says “what if we built…” and then we build it. That’s how we ended up with Dolly, an AI assistant for WordPress.com that you can talk to from pretty much anywhere.
The name
It comes from Hello, Dolly!, the plugin that’s shipped with WordPress since forever. Ours lives in Telegram rather than your dashboard (not yet, anyway). Message @wordpressagentbot, connect your WordPress.com account, and it can see and act on your sites.
What it does
Manage your sites, clean up pages, sort out domains, get unstuck on content. Under the hood it’s calling WordPress Abilities: pluggable, AI-callable actions that developers can register and extend. Someone on my team is controlling their home printer with it, because of course they are.
The trick people like most is blogging from your phone. Send Dolly a photo, it lands in your media library, and you can have a post drafted before you’ve put the phone down. I mostly use it for note-taking and brainstorming, and occasionally for almost publishing things.
Personality
We showed an early version at WordCamp Asia expecting polite interest and got real enthusiasm instead. Since then the guiding question has been “what would we enjoy talking to?” So Dolly has a personality you can tune (mine is lowercase and very brief), remembers things about you across conversations, and is fun to talk to. The memory part matters more than I expected. We renamed Dolly once internally and someone was annoyed, not joking-annoyed, because it felt like their history with it had been wiped. That told me more than any metrics chart.
Under the hood
Dolly runs on Automattic’s a8c AI framework and the WordPress Abilities API. It’s the WordPress.com support assistant and the site-builder assistant merged into one thing with one personality. Internally we can point it at its own code and it helps debug itself, which is a little existential but useful.
Why
The bigger goal is to give regular people, the ones who find this stuff intimidating, what developers are getting from tools like Claude Code and OpenClaw, with no setup. If you have a WordPress.com account and a phone, you’re in.
It’s live at wordpress.com/ai. Go say hello, and tell me what you get it to do.