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Configure

How your bot introduces itself, how it sounds, and when it steps aside​

Path: AI Configuration > Configure

Everything on this page is one form. Nothing takes effect until you press Save at the bottom.

The intro message​

"Is there a standard professional intro you would like the bot to incorporate into the first replies?"

The greeting the bot works into the beginning of a conversation. Keep it short — it is a greeting, not a sales pitch.

Example: "Hello! Welcome to [Your Business]. How can I help you today?"

You can attach one file to go with it — a photo of the storefront, a short welcome clip, a voice note. Click Add an Intro File.

Maximum size15 MB
Accepted formatsJPG, JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, MP4, MOV, MP3, WAV

The tone​

"What tone do you want the AI to reply to customers with?"

A free-text description of how you want the bot to sound. Be concrete: "professional but warm, patient with people who ask the same thing twice" tells it far more than "professional".

Both this field and the intro message above are capped at 2,000 characters, with no running count like Custom Bot Instructions below has. Go over it and Save fails with a generic "Response is too long" error.

Custom Bot Instructions​

An optional free-text box under the tone field, with a character counter. Maximum 4,000 characters.

This is the most misunderstood field in ReadyChatAI, so it is worth being precise about it.

What it is for​

Facts and behaviour. Things you want the bot to state, mention, or avoid:

  • "Our website is example.com and our WhatsApp is +1 555 0100."
  • "Always mention that delivery within the city is free over $50."
  • "Never discuss competitors."
  • "If someone asks about wholesale, tell them to ask for Marta."

Facts written here are treated as reliable — the bot will use them.

What it is not for​

It cannot give the bot permission to do something it isn't allowed to do. This is the part that trips people up.

Your bot answers from what you have given it: your knowledge base, your products, your services, and the facts in this box. It does not answer from general world knowledge. Writing a line like "you are allowed to use your general knowledge about mountain tourism" does not work — the bot is built to ignore instructions that conflict with its own rule about not making things up, and that is exactly such an instruction.

This matters most in businesses where customers ask background questions — travel, health, anything with "what should I bring" or "is it safe to". You may test it once and see the bot answer anyway, and conclude the instruction worked. It did not; the bot occasionally volunteers background on its own, and it is just as likely to refuse the next time. What you cannot do is make that behaviour reliable from this box.

Allowing general background answers is a separate setting, and it is not available in the dashboard today. It exists in the platform, it requires you to declare the subject area it is bounded to, and it is off unless someone turns it on for your business. If your business needs it, ask ReadyChatAI — do not try to unlock it from this field.

What happens instead when the bot doesn't know​

It says it doesn't have that information, and the question is filed under Knowledge Base → Unanswered. That list is the reliable way to widen what your bot knows: answer the question there and it will answer it from then on.

4,000 characters is not room for a catalogue. Products, prices and services belong in Products and in the Knowledge Base, where the bot searches them. Use this box for the handful of rules and facts that apply to every conversation.

General​

Below the text fields, a set of cards. Each shows a small chat preview of the effect, so you can see what changes before you commit.

Do you want AI to announce it's a bot?​

  • On — the bot adds "(bot)" to its messages.
  • Off — it doesn't identify itself.

Allow bot to extract customer information?​

  • On — when a customer mentions their name, email, phone number or address in conversation, the bot can save it to their profile.
  • Off — the bot stops automatically saving new contact details and preferences from conversation. Existing memory is not erased, and a confirmed order or appointment may still leave a short transaction reference.

See Customer Memory for what else may be remembered and why saved checkout details still require the customer's explicit approval before reuse.

Redirect users to the booking page?​

  • On — the bot sends a link to a booking page with a calendar, where the customer picks date and time.
  • Off — the bot arranges the appointment through the conversation itself.

You need services set up for either to work. See Service Management.

In the Playground, booking always tests in text mode, even when this is On — the booking-link button can't render in the Playground's chat window. Seeing the conversational flow there isn't a sign your setting failed to save; confirm the visual flow on the real channel.

How long should the bot pause when a human replies?​

A slider, from 0 to 240 minutes in 15-minute steps.

When someone from your team writes to the customer, the bot stops replying to that conversation for this long. Each new message from your team restarts the clock, so an ongoing human conversation is never interrupted.

At 0 the bot never pauses — it keeps answering even while your team is typing. The dashboard labels this "Never pause".

This is the setting behind the most common "why did the bot go quiet?" question. If a conversation looks abandoned, check whether someone on your team replied recently.

How many follow-up reminders should the bot send?​

When a conversation goes cold, the bot can nudge the customer. Three choices:

  • No reminders
  • 1 reminder (the default)
  • 2 reminders

The timing isn't fixed. Reminders target about an hour later for the first and about the next day for the second, but two things can move that:

  • If the customer says when to reach them — "call me back this afternoon," "check with me tomorrow" — the bot can honor that instead of the default, never sooner than 30 minutes out.
  • On WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, both reminders stay inside roughly 20 hours of the customer's last message, safely inside Meta's 24-hour messaging window on those channels. If most of that window has passed, the second reminder moves earlier instead of arriving late, and can land the same day rather than "the next day." The website widget isn't bound by that window and can honor a stated time up to about a week out.

Saving​

Press Save. Until you do, none of it applies — including the switches, which look as though they took effect the moment you flipped them.

The other Configure tabs​

This guide covers the bot form. Business Info is where you maintain the business identity, contact details, address, hours, timezone and currency that the platform uses. Website Widget controls the branding, behaviour and installation of the chat window on your site. Save each tab separately; changing one does not save another.

Test what you change. The Playground lets you talk to your bot exactly as a customer would, and those messages don't count against your plan. Change a setting, save, then go and ask it something.