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My PersonaChannelsChannel Overview

Channel Overview

Channels are the different kinds of methods that users can chat with your persona. Currently, your AI persona can be connected to the following channels:

Web Channels

  • Web: a full-page web experience that includes a chat interface. Your AI persona is accessible via a web link (e.g., companyx.personastudios.ai). Click Chat with your persona to test this web interface
    • When to use: if you want to have users see nothing else but the persona chat, or if you’re looking to embed this experience into your mobile app via webview or other experience.
  • Web Widget: Embed a widget on your website for real-time interactions. Use the Preview Widget option to see how the web widget will appear on your site.
    • When to use: if you want users coming to your webpage to see a customizable chat icon on the bottom right/left where they can ask questions or run any agenda you’ve setup.

Messaging Channels

  • Facebook Messenger: Allow users to ask questions and run agendas on Facebook Messenger, and have your persona auto-reply.
    • When to use: If you have an existing Facebook messaging account that you want the persona to auto-respond to all messages (especially useful if you’re not replying to all inbound messages)
  • Instagram: Enable AI-driven conversations through Instagram DMs.
    • When to use: If you have an existing Instagram account or want to start reaching out to users on Instagram. Users can DM your account to ask questions or run agendas.
  • WhatsApp: Engage users via WhatsApp messaging.
    • When to use: We strongly recommend using WhatsApp for almost all use cases. Even if you have a web channel setup, you can have users ask questions and run agendas via your WhatsApp account. A majority of our customers use WhatsApp in addition to any web channels given it’s widespread usage worldwide.
  • SMS / Text Messages: Communicate via text messages.
    • When to use: For countries that heavily rely on SMS (e.g. USA), you may want to enable this channel as well.
  • Slack: Integrate with Slack to allow team members to interact with your AI persona.
    • When to use: If you have an internal slack where you want members of your team to be able to ask questions, they can do so either in public channels like #general or run agendas in DM’s to the persona (e.g. submitting weekly reports or feedback requests via a DM conversation with your persona instead of a boring form).
  • Discord: Connect with users on Discord.
    • When to use: If you maintain a public discord where you are building a community of users, this is perfect for them to be able to ask questions or even run agendas like intro requests, tutorials, or any agenda you can think of. Same rules as Slack: users can ask any general questions in the public channels like #welcome or run agendas in private DM’s to the persona.
  • Other Channels: Feel free to reach out to us at hello@personastudios.ai if you have an important channel you’d like to add to this list.

A few global notes about channels:

  1. In almost all cases, the persona will respond exactly the same regardless of what channel a user is using with a few exceptions: a. If your agenda collects a name and email, on Web and Web Widget since we already collect name and email, the agenda will pre-populate these values from the dialog box and not ask the user again for name and email. On messaging channels like WhatsApp and Facebook, we will still ask for name and email. b. In messaging channels, users can change the current language the persona is speaking by saying the language (e.g. “Spanish”, “Japanese”, or something similar). In the web channels, the user must select the language using the provided widget. c. On web channels, you are able to set an option to pre-trigger the agenda of your choice (covered in more detail in the agenda section), but in messaging channels the persona will always start with a greeting message. This means users will have to send a message to start an agenda (e.g. “I’d like to apply for the software dev role”).
  2. Once you hook up a channel, try to avoid sending messages unless you are inside our system. For example, if your persona is connected to Facebook Messenger, and you send messages from within the Meta platform, we will not be able to see the messages you send… and to make things worse when your user replies to the message you just sent, our AI persona will respond thinking your user is talking to them.
  3. Users on web can only send one message at a time. On messaging channels, users can send multiple short messages at a time. For most cases, this should be fine – if your persona receives a message before the persona sends a complete answer, the persona will regenerate the answer and include all the previous messages. In short, if a user says “Yes that’s fine” then immediately “Oh wait” then “Nevermind, I’d like to cancel”, we combine these all into one message and provide an answer, ultimately allowing the user to cancel rather than sending three separate responses back.
  4. Remember that any messaging channel you hook up will set the persona into auto-respond. If you send personal messages on a channel, you will either have to stop sending personalized messages or create a new account / phone number / channel to allow the persona to stay in auto-respond mode.
  5. For messaging channels, you can “takeover” the conversation by looking for the “send message” button at the bottom of the conversation detail. On Web, we currently do not offer this “takeover” button as it’s much harder to know if the user will actually receive the message if they navigate away from the page or start a new tab. In most cases, you can send a message only when the user has sent at least one message to your persona in the last 24 hours (per Meta and other companies’ time restrictions on business accounts messaging back).

See the instructions on the next pages to see how to set up each of the channels.

For assistance, contact our support team at hello@personastudios.ai.

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