Media and channel differences
What the bot can understand and what the customer can receive
Text behaves similarly across channels. Attachments do not: the channel, file type and your account's available AI allowance all affect what the bot can understand or deliver.
Media a customer sends to the bot
When the connected channel provides a supported attachment:
- Voice notes and audio: the bot can transcribe the speech and answer it as a message.
- Images: the bot can describe the visible content and use it as context. For example, it may use a product photo to help search your catalogue.
- Documents: the bot can read a bounded portion of a supported document — PDF, DOCX, XLSX, TXT or CSV. Any other file type (a slide deck, a scanned image saved as a document, and so on) is stored and shown in Messages, but the bot only sees that something was attached, never its contents. Even a supported file is capped: at most 5 MB, the first 5 pages or sheets, and roughly 10,000 characters of text. A file past those limits is read only partially: the bot is told the document was cut short so it can mention that, but its reply does not always say so.
- Video: the bot knows that a video was attached, but it does not watch or understand the video's contents. Ask the customer for a description or a still image when the contents matter.
- Stickers: treat stickers as decorative. They do not provide reliable visual context to the bot.
Website chat visitors can only type to the bot — the widget has no way to attach a photo, voice note or document, so everything above applies to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram customers only.
Image and audio understanding can be unavailable when the account has no remaining allowance for that processing. If a voice note expired or was otherwise lost before the bot could fetch it, the bot tells the customer it could not retrieve the file and asks them to resend it or type their message instead. If processing fails for another reason (an outage or an unreadable file, for example), the bot never blames the file's format and does not ask for a resend — it simply continues the conversation with whatever it already knows. Either way, the original attachment can still appear in Messages, but the bot may need the customer to explain it in text.
Media the bot sends to a customer
Products and Knowledge Base answers can have media attached when that feature is available. The delivery rules are:
| Channel | Images | Documents | Video | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| file | file | file or link | file | |
| Facebook Messenger | file | file | file or link | file |
| file | link | file or link | link | |
| Website chat | file | file | file or link | not sent by the bot |
“Link” means the customer receives a clickable URL instead of an attachment. It is the safe fallback when a channel cannot carry the file.
For video on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, use MP4. MOV and WebM are stored, but customers on those channels receive a link rather than a playable attachment.
Product photos are not sent with every product mention. The customer should explicitly ask to see the product, and the bot can then send a small selection of its images.
Sending a photo or a Knowledge Base attachment never counts against your plan's message allowance — only a text reply does, so Messages Remaining does not drop when the bot sends media.
Channel-specific conversation limits
- Facebook and Instagram normally allow a business to send direct messages only inside Meta's 24-hour window after the customer's last message.
- A public comment and a private message are different conversations. Comment replies have a narrower set of actions; see Comment replies.
- The website widget and Playground display media inside ReadyChatAI rather than sending it through Meta.
If a file matters to the sale, test it in the Playground and on the real channel you plan to use. A file appearing in the dashboard does not by itself prove that a carrier can deliver that format.