How to setup AvoAI
A guide on Avochato’s AI Build-a-Bot functionality
If you are a Beta user and have access to AvoAI, welcome to the AvoAI product guide! If you don’t have access, please join the waitlist within your Avochato account. This guide will walk you through step-by-step instructions, tips, and insights to ensure a good understanding of how to set up AvoAI and make the most of your automated assistant.
Build-a-Bot
The steps below outline how to create and configure your automated assistant. The details that you choose in these steps can always be changed before and after the assistant is activated. Note that even if the assistant is turned on, it won’t engage with a contact until you assign the assistant to the conversation, or until you add the assistant as a user to Avochato’s auto-assignment and skill routing features.
1. Name your Bot
Let’s get started! What do you want your bot to be addressed as? When AvoAI is asked its name, this is what it will reply with.
2. Select Bot Personality
How do you want your bot to interact with your audience/contacts? We have a variety of different combinations to suit a wide range of personalities.
3. User Name
How do you want your bot to address your audience/contacts? When AvoAI replies to your audience/contacts, this will be the preferred name it will call them by. “None” would mean the bot will not refer to your audience/contacts by any specified name.
For example, if first name is selected: "Hello Jane, I can help you with that.”
4. Response Delay (Seconds)
How long of a delay do you want your bot’s messages to send? AvoAI messages are set to respond after this delay. This will allow an agent to manually edit or cancel pending messages, prior to that outbound sending.
- Set a longer delay to give your team time to review your bot’s responses before they send. However, please note that messages will send even while an agent is editing a message once the time delay is up.
- Set a shorter delay to respond nearly instantly to each inbound message. However, please note that if your team plans to review messages beforehand, this will give them less time to do so before the message sends.
5. Use Contact Fields in Responses
This option lets your bot have access to your contact’s data. Selecting “Yes” means that Avochato contact fields, including all custom fields, will be used to help the assistant provide more specific responses to each contact that engages with the assistant. This data is NOT used to train third party large language models or shared across different contacts or inboxes, and is only used when replying to that contact. The contact fields used are the following:
Once you have built your bot, you can test it before it interacts with your contacts. You can also adjust training data during testing and/or after the bot is live.
6. Hours of Operation
Control when your Avobot will reply based on the time of day and your inbox’s Office Hours. By default, AvoBots will respond during all hours.
Reminder: if an inbox has no Office Hours configured, any time of day is considered to be “during office hours” for that inbox. Office hours can be configured per day of the week, per inbox.
Prompts
1. Add Prompt
To train your bot on how to better interact with your audience/contacts, click on the purple “Add Prompt” button on the right to copy and paste plain text instructions for AvoAI. This content is not publicly available anywhere else.
- Enter Title
Choose a name for this Prompt. This will just help you organize and locate this prompt later on, if you decide to edit or disable it. This title will not be used to train the model.
- Content
Content pasted within this prompt will be used to help train the bot. This section is fully customizable, adding as much detail as you’d like to instruct your bot (there is no character limit). For example:
“You are a customer support agent at [insert company name]. You will provide details about our product and services, and instruct contacts to do the following steps [insert relevant details and instructions here based on your use case]. You will refer to the online documentation located at [insert link(s) here].”
Specific, public URLs must be used, not just a single domain link. In the future, functionality to scrape the contents of an entire public domain may be available.
Example IFTTT Content: "If the user asks about ABC topic," then respond with the exact language “Thanks for your question, ABC can be used for ….“
- Enable
After the content has been added, you have the option either enable this Prompt. Once enabled, this will be actively used by your bot. You can disable the Prompt anytime if you no longer wish to use it for your bot.
- Save / Update
Whether or not you choose to enable the Prompt, scroll down to click on the “Save” button once all fields have been filled out.
To edit a Prompt that was previously created, hover over the row so that it highlights yellow. Click into the Text Field to make any edits, then click on the “Update” button.
2. Tips & Tricks: Prompts
- You can upload multiple prompts into AvoAI for your bot to learn from. Creating multiple prompts isn’t required, but might be helpful for users who want to organize their training data while they are updating their prompts.
- For example, Avochato’s bot could be trained with data on both sales information and live chat support. However, if Avochato was in the process of updating live chat support content, we could mark that specific prompt as inactive as to not disrupt the bot from answering sales information questions.
Activate your Bot
Active
Now that your bot is built and trained with data, head to the Overview page to turn your bot on! Click on the “Status” toggle so that its status reads as Active. Your bot can now act as agent and interact with your audience/contacts, alongside the rest of the team on your auto assignment roster. The bot won’t engage with a contact until you assign the assistant to the conversation.
You can also manually assign your bot to any existing conversations within your inbox. Click on "All Messages" and choose any conversation in your inbox.
In the "Assignee" dropdown, select your bot. Once assigned, then your bot will be able to take over the conversation and respond on your behalf after the next inbound message.
To stop the bot from responding, simply unassign your bot from the conversation. You can also turn the bot off entirely in the Overview tab. To deactivate your bot, simply click on the “Status” toggle to “Inactive”.