 Are you new to streaming or just looking for an easy way to help manage your Twitch chat? Setting up a chatbot can be a great solution to help manage your chat more efficiently. Let's go through how to set up Streamlabs chatbot here after referred to as Cloudbot as a first-time user. In this video, we'll cover the basics of setting up Cloudbot for Twitch and go over some of its features. First things first, you'll need to go to streamlabs.com and sign up or log in using your Twitch account. There's a whole ton of stuff here, but we're going to focus on Cloudbot for now, so go ahead and click Cloudbot on the left navigation menu. The next thing you'll need to do is get the bot to join your channel. Next to Cloudbot at the top, toggle the switch to turn Cloudbot on. Once the bot has joined your channel, you'll need to grant moderator privileges to Cloudbot by typing slash mod streamlabs in your Twitch chat. If you've already done this, you'll get a confirmation that Streamlabs is already a moderator and if not, you'll get a message saying that they have been made one. Even if you think you've already done this step, it doesn't hurt to do it again just to get that confirmation. Now that it's working, go back into Streamlabs and notice the row of tabs on the Cloudbot page. Each one of these will take you to a different set of configuration options for the bot. Let's go through each of them and I'll point out some good stuff to turn on to get started. The first tab is labeled mod tools. We're going to cover this, but let's come back to it later. Second tab labeled name has a little icon next to it, which means it's premium feature only available with Streamlabs Ultra. This will let you use an alternate Twitch account as the bot instead of having everything Cloudbot says come from the Streamlabs account in chat, which can be pretty cool, but I'm not sure it's worth paying for Ultra if that's the only feature you're going to use. The next tab is modules and we'll come right back to this, but since most of the modules require the loyalty system to be turned on, let's go look at that first. Under the loyalty tab, you'll get a whole bunch of options to set up a loyalty point system. Users can earn points by watching your stream and by other means following, subbing, stuff like that. These points can be used to give a sense of cost to your commands or gambled with modules, other things like that. To turn the system on, click the enable loyalty button. You'll see a few tabs of options here as well. The users tab lets you see the points your users have accrued and their time watched. You can also edit these values for each user. The settings tab is where you can set up how the loyalty points work. You can rename them from points to anything you want, like dollar do's or Gill or Lil Pumpkins or whatever you want. You can adjust how many points users earn for viewing, how often they accrue, whether they get more points for being active in chat, bonuses for follows, subs, raids, donations. I encourage you to play around with this a bit and figure out how you like things. Now that you have points set up, let's go back to the modules. Most of these require the loyalty points we just set up, but the first group doesn't and it's worth reviewing, especially if this is your only chat bot for Twitch. The chat alerts module lets you establish some basic chat-based messaging when certain Twitch events happen, like new follows, cheers, and subscriptions. I encourage you to click through these options and set up basic messages for follows, bits, subs, and raids at the bare minimum. I recommend an anonymous follow message that doesn't call out the user, but that's a whole separate topic for another day. Back in the module list, you can see most of the rest of the modules are mini-games that can be played with loyalty points. There's gambling, magic eight ball, slots, and some others. Feel free to turn on any of these that seem interesting. You can click preferences to configure them further. Finally, we arrive at the commands tab. This is going to be the meat of your chat bot. When you click commands, it goes immediately to your custom commands, but before we go through those, let's look at the default commands available. There are some moderation commands that help you and your moderators adjust your custom commands on the fly from chat. If you enable these, your moderators can create whole new commands, edit your commands all from chat, which is pretty nice. We'll get into these in a whole separate video sometime. If you're using link protection through Streamlabs, you can adjust the exclamation permit command here that allows users to post links for a given amount of time. There are some commands for giveaways, for the quote system that lets your users save and recall quotes, simple queue system, media share commands, commands to manage the loyalty point system, and other modules. Under miscellaneous, there are some other good commands that help you and your moderators manage the stream title and category from chat, as well as turning on and off safe mode. Go ahead and browse these default commands and turn on the ones you think you might want to use. Now let's get into the fun stuff, custom commands. Back at the top of the commands tab, the custom. Click the add command button to open the form to create a custom command. Streamlabs has a great feature here where you can choose a template to start from. They have a lot of the popular commands built right in here. All you have to do is choose them and save. I recommend that you look through these and enable a few of them, but as an example, let's look at the exclamation lurk command. When you select from the list, it will automatically fill in the response box with an appropriate message, many of which have some variables used to make the commands work. It's worth clicking through each of these examples to see what kind of custom variables they put in the message. You'll recognize variables in Streamlabs because they're always wrapped in curly brackets. The lurk uses the username variable to populate the name of the person who typed the command. You can also specify how this command responds, whether in chat or in a whisper, and specify who has permission to use this command. The advanced tab has even more options where you can specify cooldowns, loyalty point costs, and aliases for this command. Once you've adjusted things how you like or left them at the default, click confirm at the bottom to save the command. If you're making your own command here from scratch, it's really the same process. You just don't select something from the template drop down, or maybe you select one that's similar to what you're trying to do and then modify it. I'll be making several super short videos about how to make very specific commands using this feature to keep a look out for those. Now let's visit the timers tab. Timed messages can be used to welcome new viewers, remind chat of upcoming events, or even promote social media channels or donation links. To set one up, click the add timer button here. For example purposes, we'll set up a follow reminder, so in the name we'll put follow. The name field is just so you know what the timer is for later. Users won't see it. The response field is where you put what you want the bot to post in chat. For now we'll just put something like, if you're enjoying the stream, don't forget to hit the follow button. You can adjust the interval, which is how often the timed message will get sent to chat. Streamlabs defaults this to five minutes, which is way, way too frequent for most streams. Look, timers are great, but you have to find the right settings so it's not just your bot spamming chat over and over and over. If you have a really active chat, this isn't that much of a problem, but in a fairly quiet chat it can get pretty spammy pretty fast, so I recommend keeping your timer interval at something like 30 minutes for at least 15. The line minimum field allows you to prevent the timer from firing even if the appropriate amount of time has passed, if there hasn't been enough other activity in chat. This is a great way to prevent the bot from being spammy and posting the same message again and again without any other chatter in between. Depending on your chat volume, I recommend setting this to at least five, if not 10 or 20. This means that at least five or 10 or 20 lines of chat from other users other than the bot have happened since this timer last fired. Could be other bots, but hopefully it's some users too. Press save at the bottom and your timer will be set up. The next tab in the menu is for the quote system. If you're using it, it'll populate all the saved quotes here so you can spot check them and make edits. You can also add quotes directly here as well. The queue system has a tab here and so does the loyalty points store, polls, giveaways, and betting modules. We're not gonna get into those at the moment. Let me know in the comments if any of these are of particular interest to you though and I can do a deep dive for sure. Now let's get back to mod tools. While I advise you to peruse these options, I don't personally find any of them all that useful except for the link protection. Let's click on that one and set it up. The top box allows you to set user levels who will automatically be permitted to post links, subscribers or regulars. Punishment drop down allows you to choose how violations of this rule are handled. Purge will delete the user's recent messages and apply a one second timeout. Timeout will purge the messages and also prevent the user from chatting for a specified amount of time and ban will purge the messages and ban the user. I recommend either purge or timeout with a very short timeout time. You don't really need to punish the user, you just need to get rid of links. The permit duration is how long a user is allowed to post links that would otherwise violate this rule when you use the exclamation permit command. You can use this command to allow users who normally can't post links to post links for 60 seconds or whatever. You also have the option here to configure the message that gets sent out when someone breaks this rule or you can turn off the punishment message entirely and have it be silent. At the top of this form, you'll see tabs for general, whitelist, and blacklist. Whitelist allows you to set up a list of domains that are always allowed regardless of who's posting the link. Blacklist allows you to set up a list of domains that are never allowed even if the user is otherwise allowed to post links. Mods can still do whatever they want, but if your mods are posting links that you disagree with then you have bigger problems. One thing to note, depending on how you have your Twitch link settings set up, links may still be blocked even if the user is given permissions with permit or that they have permissions through string labs. We'll go into the native twitch auto mod settings in another video, but since we're talking about this, let's take a look at where this setting is in Twitch real quick. In your creator dashboard, go to settings and moderation. In the second section labeled chat options, there's a van hyperlinks toggle. If you want cloudbot to have more control of link moderation, simply leave this toggle off in twitch. I recommend familiarizing yourself with the rest of twitch auto mod settings as well, as they're quite comprehensive and can now do most of what people used to have to rely on bots like stream elements or stream labs or nightbot for. Back in cloudbot, let's take a quick look at the word protection options. This module allows you to do word based moderation in your chat. Honestly, you're probably best off doing this natively within twitch at this point, but if you want to have cloudbot handle it, you can view the options here. There's a few toggles. One is to use the default blacklist. Who knows what's on there, but it's probably a pretty decent generic option if you want to set it and forget it kind of approach. The scan user names toggle makes the same set of blacklist rules apply for user names and chat as well as the messages that are sent. You can also set the message that is sent to offenders to set up a custom blacklist instead of or in addition to the default list that stream labs provides. Click the blacklist tab, then the add word phrase button. For each word or phrase that you enter, you can choose the word detected punishment level and whether or not the word uses a regex expression, which you're welcome to ask me about in the comments if you have an idea for some fancy blacklist rule. Now we've explored the dashboard, have a basic chatbot setup, some simple commands for both viewers and moderators to use, few basic moderation tools, timed messages, and the know how needed to make new custom commands. Speaking of custom commands, check out this video on how to make a custom shoutout command with Cloudbot.