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Conversation settings

These four settings control the first thing a visitor sees and how the chatbot sounds throughout.

Welcome message​

The message shown when the chat panel opens, before the visitor types anything.

The default is "Hi! How can I help you today?", which is fine but wastes the opportunity. A good welcome message tells the visitor what this particular bot is good at.

Compare:

Hi! How can I help you today?

Hi — I'm the Northgate Garden Centre assistant. I can help with opening hours, plant care advice, delivery, and what we have in stock.

The second sets expectations, which means fewer questions the bot cannot answer.

Markdown is supported. Use **bold**, bullet lists and links to structure a longer greeting:

👋 **Welcome to Northgate.**

I can help with:
- Opening hours and directions
- Delivery and returns
- Plant care advice

What can I get you?

Keep it short. Three lines is plenty; a wall of text on open gets dismissed.

Quick prompts​

Suggested questions shown as tappable buttons before the first message.

These do more work than almost any other setting. A visitor faced with an empty text box often closes the widget. A visitor shown three relevant questions clicks one.

Choose prompts your chatbot answers well. They are a shop window — do not put something there you cannot deliver.

Good quick prompts:

  • What are your opening hours?
  • Do you deliver to my area?
  • What's your returns policy?

Poor quick prompts:

  • Tell me about your company — vague, produces a vague answer
  • Help — tells the visitor nothing
  • What's the price of the X-500 in blue with next-day delivery? — too specific to be broadly useful

Three to five is the sweet spot.

Persona​

A short label for the role the chatbot plays. The default is Helpful Assistant.

Set it to something that matches its actual job: Customer Support Agent, Booking Assistant, Technical Support Specialist, Concierge. This shapes how the model frames its replies.

Tone​

How the chatbot sounds. The default is Professional.

ToneFits
ProfessionalMost businesses — clear, courteous, no slang
FriendlyConsumer brands, hospitality, retail
CasualYounger audiences, lifestyle brands
FormalLegal, financial, medical, institutional

Tone changes register, not accuracy. A casual bot still refuses to invent facts — it just declines more chattily.

Language​

You do not need to configure this. The chatbot replies in whatever language the visitor writes in.

The quality of a non-English reply depends on your indexed content. If your site is entirely in English and someone asks in Spanish, the bot will answer in Spanish using the English source material — usually well, but for a genuinely multilingual audience, index your translated pages too.

Test the whole opening​

Open the dashboard Chat page and look at the first screen exactly as a visitor would:

  • Does the welcome message explain what this bot is for?
  • Do the quick prompts invite a click?
  • Does clicking one give a good answer?

That first ten seconds decides whether the widget gets used at all.

Next​