How the bot builds its conversation
Why there is no script, what the bot is actually given, and how to steer it.
Your bot does not follow a script, and it is worth understanding why before you try to configure one.
It is given three things — who you are, what it needs to find out, and what has been said so far — and asked to have a useful conversation. So it reorders questions, merges two into one when the customer has already half-answered both, and rephrases everything to suit whoever it is talking to. A lead who opens with "hi, I need a photographer for a wedding in June, budget about 40k" has answered three of your questions before the bot has said anything, and the bot will not ask them again.
Everything the bot knows is configuration read at runtime. There is no per-customer code anywhere in this product. That is what lets you change a question this afternoon and have the next conversation use it.
What you control
| You set | Where | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Your business, in your words | Business profile | The context the whole conversation happens in |
| The bot's name and personality | Business profile | How it talks |
| What you call both sides | Business profile | The actual nouns in its sentences |
| The questions | Intake fields | What it must find out |
| A hint per question | Intake fields | What a good answer looks like |
| The rules | Qualification | Who it politely turns away |
The shape of a conversation
- Greeting. It introduces itself as your business.
- Intake. It collects your required questions, in whatever order the conversation makes natural.
- Clarification. When an answer is unusable — "flexible" for a budget — it asks again, differently. This is the stage prompt hints exist to shorten.
- Qualification. Once it has the required answers, your rules run.
- Handoff or a polite no. Qualified leads are matched against your records and your team is notified. Disqualified leads get the message you wrote.
Prompt hints are the steering wheel
A hint is one sentence per question, telling the bot what an acceptable answer looks like. It is not shown to the customer.
A required question with no hint is the most common cause of a conversation that loops. The bot knows it needs an answer and has nothing to judge one against, so it accepts something useless or asks the same thing three ways.
Field: budget_range
Hint: A number or a range. "Flexible" is not an answer — ask for a ceiling.
Field: start_date
Hint: A month is enough. "ASAP" means this month.
Write hints as instructions to a new colleague, not as descriptions of the field. "The customer's budget" tells the bot nothing it could not infer from the label.
Personality is a tone, not a costume
The personality field changes register — brisk, warm, formal. It does not change what the bot asks or what it will accept, and it is not a place to put instructions. "Always ask about budget first" belongs in your intake questions and their order; written into personality it competes with the conversation the bot is actually trying to have.
Test it, do not reason about it
Every change here is one message away from being observable. Open the playground, answer badly on purpose, and see what happens. That is a faster loop than reading this page twice, and it is the same pipeline your customers get.
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