What is an "assistant"?

Assistants are modern chatbots, powered by generative AI, that can be trained quickly and easily on business-specific information. Assistants can understand customer queries in meaningful ways, perform a wide range of helpful, automated tasks, and answer questions accurately across various domains in a conversational manner.

Multiple assistants can be added, each with their own instructions, functions, and settings. Assistants are independent services that can cross-integrate with other platforms (i.e., assistants can be used elsewhere).

• A s added to your account by default.

• You can add any number of .

Assistant Types

General Assistant

A general assistant is added to your account by default. This general assistant can be but cannot be disabled or deleted.

The general assistant uses its own set of documentation and curated responses to generate answers. This documentation includes general information about the business, such as its vision and mission, general FAQs, company policies, products and services offered, etc.

Additional Assistants

You can as many assistants to your account as you want. Each assistant has their own instruction (system prompt), settings, set of , and . These assistants can either use their own documentation exclusively or access both their and the general assistants' documentation.

An example includes having different assistants for different departments within a business, such as HR (internal) or Customer Support (external), where each assistant uses documentation specific to its function.

Currently, you can select between two types of additional assistants:

• Content Generation

• Intent Recognition

1. On the Assistants tab, select the Test icon.

1. Use the chat widget on the right to test whether your assistant behaves as you expect.

   • Interact with the assistant as your customers will.

   • If you want to change the assistant's setup details, click the Edit button.

This feature uses AI to understand the nature of existing workflows or assistants, and can route the user to the appropriate next step, based on the information available to it.

If a user is interacting with a flow, and changes their mind about what they want to do mid flow, the Context Router is able to route them appropriately.

Configure this feature as follows:

1. Launch Clickatell AI, and click on Context Router.

Note that the flows and agents listed, are only the ones for which a was generated in Chat Flow. This summary provides the Context Router with the information that it needs.

From the Clickatell AI Portal, you can configure , use our to train the assistants on specific information, and you can use to create specific responses rather than relying on AI-generated ones.

Follow these steps to use Clickatell AI:

1. the Clickatell AI portal (also accessible via My Workspace in the ).

The Clickatell AI service enables you to build, customize, and train modern AI assistants built on a hosted large language model (LLM) and pre-trained on specific information provided by your business. It lets your customers ask questions and extract accurate, concise, and contextually relevant answers from a chatbot, referencing the information it was trained on, or from a live agent supported by the virtual assistant in Chat Desk.

In addition, the Clickatell AI powers the following features across our products:

Common or recurring questions from customers can be addressed with hard-coded answers to provide a precise response rather than an AI-generated one when very specific wording is required. The system identifies when a query matches a curated response and provides that as the answer.

Add a new response

1. In the Curated Responses tab, click New Response.

An intent recognition assistant is trained to identify specific intents from user inputs and uses a reasoning process to ask questions until all intents are identified.

You must create an intent set first before adding an intent recognition assistant to link it to.

Create intent sets

Intent sets are groups of related intents, called intent slots, that must be identified. The system asks questions to gather the information needed to fill the required slots. If it cannot identify all slots in the initial input, it will ask follow-up questions until it reaches the predefined loop limit.

To create a new intent set:

1. Click New Intent Set on the Intent Recognition tab.

1. Add a name and description for the intent set. These are for internal reference only so you can easily identify them.

2. Add intent slots. These are specific pieces of information that must be identified to fulfill an intent.

   1. Name: Enter a name for the intent slot.

1. Set a loop limit (max. 20) to prevent infinite loops. This limit defines the maximum number of attempts the system will make to identify all required slots before displaying the failed attempt message (see below).

2. Enter a failed attempt message. This message is displayed to the end-user when the loop limit has been reached (see above).

3. Save.

Example 1

USER: What is the weather in Cape Town tomorrow morning?

• The system classifies this as a weather intent.

• “Cape Town” is detected as a location slot and "tomorrow morning” as a date_time slot.

Example 2

USER: “I owe Lisa money”

ASSISTANT: "Do you want to pay her back? How much would you like to pay?"

USER: "Yes, 120."

ASSISTANT: "To confirm, you want to pay 120 dollars to Lisa from your savings account. Is that correct? Tap below to pay now.”

USER: * Taps button *

• In this scenario, the bot understood the initial request, and then filled the intent slots with the information gathered by asking a few questions:

  • the action (pay),

  • the amount (500),

  • the currency (USD), and

Assistants are trained on documents that you upload and manage in the Document Manager tab. Each document is linked to an assistant, allowing that assistant to generate accurate and helpful responses based on specific information.

Assistants and how they can be trained

Scenario 1: General assistant uses general documentation for context and calls LLM for the response.

Scenario 2: Assistant uses its own and general documentation for context and calls LLM for the response.

Scenario 3: Assistant uses only its own documentation for context and calls LLM for the response.

Scenario 4: Assistant uses and its own documentation for context. If an answer is found among curated responses, it is sent directly to the end-user, bypassing the LLM.

Adding documents to an assistant

1. On the Document Manager tab, select the you want to train from the drop-down and click Upload.

1. Add the files containing the information you want to the selected assistant trained on. You can:

   • Upload PDF files, plain text files (.txt), and markdown files (.md).

   • Enter a URL to convert a webpage to a text file (.txt).

You can add multiple files at once:

1. Once the upload is complete, return to the Document Manager page and click Sync.

1. You can disable, download, or delete the documents from the Document Manager tab.

Add assistants

To add a new assistant, follow the below steps. You can add as many assistants as you need.

1. In the Assistants tab, click New Assistant.