Key concepts
Eight words show up across every page in this product. Learn them once here and the rest of the docs will read faster.
Chatbot (or “Agent”)
A single AI assistant with its own name, knowledge, behavior, and integrations. You can have many chatbots in one organization — for example, one for support, one for sales, one internal. Throughout the UI you’ll see both Chatbot and Agent used interchangeably; they mean the same thing.
Knowledge source (or “Data source”)
A piece of content the chatbot has been trained on. Every source has a type — website, document, YouTube transcript, snippet, article, Google Drive, or Notion (New). Sources are versioned: you can edit a snippet or article inline, and you can re-train when an underlying website changes.
Action
Something the chatbot can do in addition to answering. Actions call real APIs — book a Calendly slot, look up a Stripe invoice, create a Salesforce lead, fire a Zapier webhook. Actions live in the AI Actions framework (New) and can require human confirmation before they fire. Every action call is recorded in an audit log.
Deployment
A place the chatbot is installed. The same chatbot can have many deployments — a website embed, a Shopify app, a WordPress plugin. Each deployment has its own token, which you can rotate independently.
Channel
A messaging surface the chatbot listens on. Channels include the embedded widget, email inbox, Slack, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. A conversation that starts on Slack and gets picked up by an agent on the web dashboard is the same conversation, on different channels.
Conversation
A thread of messages between an end-user and a chatbot — and possibly one or more human agents. Conversations have a status (open, closed, solved), an assignee, and a complete transcript. Conversations are the unit you measure in analytics and the unit your team works on in the agent dashboard.
Playground
A sandbox where you test a chatbot without users seeing the conversation. You can change the model, temperature, and prompt template on every message, and compare models side-by-side. Use the playground before changing behavior in production.
Organization
A workspace — your company, your client, or a single project. Each organization has its own members, billing, chatbots, and integrations. One account can belong to many organizations and switch between them.
A few more words you’ll see
- Quota — the cap on how much knowledge or how many messages your plan includes. Watch this in the knowledge base and billing pages.
- Add-on — extra capacity (more messages, more storage) you buy on top of your plan.
- Permission / Role — who can do what. Roles include Owner, Admin, and Member; finer-grained permissions can also restrict access to a specific chatbot.
- Auto-recharge — automatic top-up when your message quota is about to run out.