Create your first chatbot
A chatbot (also called an agent in some screens) is a single AI assistant with its own knowledge, behavior, and integrations. You can have many in one organization. This guide creates the first one.
In this guide:
- Open the Chatbots dashboard
- Open the Create New Chatbot dialog
- Fill in name, description, and purpose
- Tour the chatbot detail tabs
- Pick what to do next
Prerequisites
- You’re signed in to Hilal Chatbot.
- You belong to at least one organization (see Sign up and organization).
- You have Create permission on chatbots — Owners and Admins do by default.
Step 1: Open the Chatbots dashboard
From the left sidebar, click Chatbots. New accounts land on an empty grid.
Screenshot: The Chatbots dashboard before creating any agents.
If you see a Permission denied overlay, your role does not allow chatbot creation. Ask an Owner or Admin in Settings → Members to bump your role or grant agent.create.
Step 2: Open the Create New Chatbot dialog
Click Create New Chatbot in the top-right.
Screenshot: The “Create New Chatbot” modal.
Step 3: Fill in name, description, and purpose
The dialog has a small form:
- Name (required) — what your team and customers will see. Examples: “Acme Support Bot”, “Sales Assistant”. You can rename later in General settings.
- Description (optional) — a sentence about what the bot does. Used internally; never shown to end-users.
- Type / Purpose (optional) — pick a category that matches the bot’s role (support, sales, internal, custom). The system uses this hint to seed sensible defaults for behavior and guidelines.
Click Create. The bot is provisioned in a second or two and you’re redirected to its detail page.
Step 4: Tour the chatbot detail tabs
The left rail of the chatbot detail page is your home base. Each tab maps to one job:
| Tab | What you’ll do here |
|---|---|
| General | Rename, redescribe, change the type. → General settings |
| Appearance / Basic | Logo, colors, position of the embedded widget. → Appearance |
| Behaviour | Response timeout, suggestions, fallback messaging. → Behavior |
| Guidelines | The system prompt — tone, persona, hard rules. → Guidelines |
| Knowledge base | Train the bot on websites, docs, etc. → Knowledge base |
| Playground | Test before deploying. → Playground |
| Actions | Connect Calendly, Slack, Stripe, Salesforce, etc. → Integrations and AI actions |
| Install | The embed snippet and deployment options. → Deploy |
| Activity | Conversation logs, with export. → Export history |
| Contacts | End-users this bot has talked to. → Contacts |
| Permissions | Who on your team can edit, test, and deploy this bot. → Per-chatbot permissions |
| Analytics | This bot’s usage and quality. → Analytics |
Troubleshooting
- “Quota exceeded” toast. Your plan caps how many chatbots you can have. Either delete an unused one or upgrade — see Plans, usage & pricing.
- You don’t see the Create button at all. That feature is hidden by your role. Ask an Owner/Admin to grant
agent.create.
What’s next
You have a chatbot but it doesn’t know anything yet. Train it.