Create an Ai Agent

Tap into the power of generative AI with Dialpad’s Ai Agent for 24/7 customer assistance that feels as natural as talking to a live agent. With ongoing machine learning, customer experiences and business processes are constantly improved, boosting automation and customer satisfaction in every interaction.

The best part? You don't need to worry about coding or complex decision trees. Dialpad Ai handles the tough stuff, using deep semantic searches to find the best answers for your customers.

Let’s dive into the details.

Who can use this feature

Ai Agents are available to Dialpad Support users on an Advanced or Premium plan.

To connect a chatbot to your Contact Center, you must have a Digital Contact Center with a Webchat channel.

Create an Ai Agent

To create an Ai Agent, head to your Dialpad Admin Settings.

Note

You must be a Company or Office Admin to create an Ai Agent.

1. Select Channels and IVR

2. Select Ai Agents

3. Select Create Ai Agent

   

4. Name the Ai Agent

   1. Most companies like to append -bot to their Ai Agent’s name (ex. Billing-bot)

   2. Your Ai Agent’s name is for internal purposes only, its not the name the bot will refer to itself in conversations with customers.

5. Choose the Ai Agent’s default language and select additional supported languages

   1. A knowledge base is created for each language

   2. You can only have 1 default language

6. Choose whether to enable Generative Ai Assistance

   1. With Generative Ai assistance, your Ai Agent will leverage the capabilities of large language models to generate fluent, natural-sounding responses to customer questions using the information in your knowledge base.

   2. With Generative Ai off, your Ai Agent will respond using links and snippets from your knowledge base, or follow the scripted responses that you've designed.

7. If you select Generative Ai Assistance, you’ll also need to:

   1. Name your Ai Agent and company.

   2. Select the industry and role.

8. Confirm you will not use the Ai Agent to process protected health information
   

9. Select Create

That’s it! Your new Ai Agent is ready to be deployed.

Tip

You can update these settings at any time by selecting the gear icon.

Add knowledge to an Ai Agent

Now that your Ai Agent has been created, it's time to give it knowledge by connecting sources. This could be an internal knowledge base, a public-facing Help Center, or any external website.

Dialpad’s chatbots can sync with the following popular content management platforms:

• Zendesk

• Document360

• Box

• Google Drive

  • You must select a specific folder, not the entire drive.

  • Google docs, PDF, HTML, TXT, and MD files are supported.

These knowledge connectors sync every 24 hours, ensuring updates to your Help Center articles are automatically reflected in the chatbot’s connected knowledge.

You can also use our custom web crawler to add content from any website.

Webcrawler configuration

When using a custom webcrawler, you can choose to crawl selected pages or the entire website.  

If crawling only specific pages, you’ll need to configure the following details.

• Base URL: The root of the website that will be crawled (this will act as the reference point for the entire domain).

• Starting Pages: The specific entry points for the crawling process. They are the actual URLs where the crawling starts but not necessarily the root of the website.

  • These URLs can be deep links that point to specific pages within the domain.

• Labels: Specify a label to be applied to each imported document. This can be useful for distinguishing documents from other sources (e.g. uploads).

You can also customize your webcrawler using the following advanced settings:

• Ignore meta directives: Instruct the crawler to disregard <meta> tag directives such as robots="noindex, nofollow" that are normally used to control how search engines index and link to a page.

• Force crawl: Instead of relying on the sitemap to discover which pages to crawl, force crawl dynamically discovers the pages by fetching and processing every discoverable link, beginning with the starting pages.

• Use custom agent: Specifies a custom user agent string.

• Ignore page locale: When set, the crawler ignores any locale specified by the page (via HTML lang attributes, HTTP headers, or meta tags) and instead treats the content as if it fits the desired locale.

• CSS selector: Use a custom CSS selector to specify what content to scrape from each page.

• Minimum wait duration: Customize the delay between crawling each page.

*If you’re using the custom webcrawler, you must have legal rights to use the crawled and imported content from all linked websites.

Not limited to websites, you can also upload helpful documents! Note that documents do not sync with Dialpad, meaning if you update your file, you must remove it and upload the newest version.

To add knowledge to your chatbot, head to your Dialpad Admin Settings.

1. Select Ai Chatbots

2. Select the desired Ai Agent

3. Navigate to Documents

4. Select Configure sources, Connect to a content source or upload documents

   

5. Select the desired option

   1. If you’re connecting to a content management system, you’ll need to provide additional details such as your domain,  API key, or locale.

6. Follow the prompts, then select Save

Want to upload individual documents?

Select Upload to add unique files.

*Individual documents cannot be larger than 5 MB.

Response types

Create unique responses to guide your users to specific information. The chatbot uses these responses when a customer's question matches the training questions you provide.

Responses are located in the Responses tab of your Ai Agent’s admin portal.

Dialpad offers 4 different types of response types.

• Text-only: Custom phrases written directly in the text editor.

  • Includes basic formatting and inbound links.

    

• Rich Media: Custom phrases written in the text editor, accompanied with image or video content.

  • Max upload size: 5 MB

  • JPEG, PNG, or GIF

  • Upload or embed functionality (must be publicly available)

• Call to Action: A responsive button that directs the user to a specific website.

  • Be sure to enter the complete URL, including https://

    

• Choice: A menu linking 2 or more responses.

  

  • We recommend linking no more than 10 responses in one choice menu.

    

Create a response

To create a response, navigate to the Responses tab.

1. Select Create response

2. Name the response

   1. The response name should match the question.

3. Select Create

   

4. Choose the desired response type

5. Add a minimum of 5 questions

   1. Select Optimize questions to have Ai generate questions for you.

6. Add labels (optional, but strongly recommended)

7. Select Save as draft, or Publish

   

Responses are not visible to end-users until published.

Best practices

• Use at least three labels per response.

• Match the response title to a trigger question, and be sure to use a variety of questions for each response.

• Less is more — be economical with text.

• Avoid duplicating by searching for existing responses before creating a new one.

Tip

Use our Optimize questions feature to have Dialpad Ai generate common questions for your responses.

When the new Ai-generated questions are added, you’ll notice that your existing questions are removed. Don’t worry, you can restore previous questions by hovering over the deleted query and selecting Keep.

Select Reoptimize questions to have Dialpad Ai generate a new set of questions.

Default messages

Default messages are automated responses presented to users based on specific behavior.

Dialpad offers 4 types of default messages:

• Welcome message: The first message that appears when Ai Agent Assist opens.

• No answer: The message that displays when the chatbot cannot find an answer.

• Positive feedback: The message that displays when a user gives a thumbs up to an answer.

• Negative feedback: The message that displays when a user gives a thumbs down to an answer.

To access your chatbot’s default messages, head to your Dialpad Admin Settings.

1. Navigate to Ai Chatbots

2. Choose the desired chatbot

3. Select Default messages

   

To change a default message:

1. Navigate to the response you want to change

2. Select the drop-down menu

3. Choose the desired response from the drop-down menu

   1. Use the search bar to find a specific response.

4. Review the new response in the preview panel
   

5. Select Save changes

Test your Ai Agent

Quickly verify your Ai Agent’s responses using the Try Now feature.

To access the Try Now preview, head to your Dialpad Admin Settings.

1. Select Channels and IVR

2. Select Ai Agents

3. Navigate to the desired chatbot

4. Select the play button

   

5. Enter the desired question and check your Ai Agent’s response

Connect the Ai Agent

Once your Ai Agent has been built and tested, it's time to connect it to your Webchat channel so clients can reach your agents when needed.

To connect an Ai Agent to your Webchat channel, head to your Dialpad Admin Settings.

1. Navigate to Channels & IVR

2. Select Digital Channels

3. Select the Ai Agent

4. Navigate to Contact Center

5. Select the Contact Center that you want to connect your Ai Agent to

   

6. Select Save changes

Train your Ai Agent

Dialpad's Optimize features help you discover areas for improvement by quickly identifying unanswered chatbot questions, letting you fill knowledge gaps by updating or adding relevant content, and fixing broken or outdated responses.

To access our Optimize features, head to your Dialpad Admin Settings.

1. Select Channels & IVR

2. Select Ai Agents

3. Select the desired Ai Agent

4. Select Optimize
   

In the Optimize section, you’ll find five different sections:

• Unanswered questions

• Broken content

• Low confidence responses

• Muted questions

• Snoozed

Let’s go over each one.

Unanswered questions

The Unanswered questions section highlights knowledge gaps in your responses or website content by identifying customer questions your chatbot could not answer.

Unanswered questions can be resolved in four different ways.

1. Add to document: Adds the question(s) to an existing document in your knowledge base.

   1. Dialpad Ai will suggest related documents, or you can use the search bar to find a specific document.

2. Snooze: Snoozes the question(s) for 24 hours, allowing you to update your connected knowledge and add it to the revised document later.

   1. Snoozed responses can be un-snoozed at any time.

3. Add to response: Adds the question(s) to an existing response.

   1. 1. Dialpad Ai will suggest related responses, or you can use the search bar to find a specific one.

      1. You can also use the Create new response option to create a new response and assign the question to it.

4. Mute all: Mutes the question(s) so it does not appear again.

   1. Muting is used for questions that cannot be answered, such as when a customer enters their phone number.

   2. Muted questions can be reviewed and un-muted at any time.

To action a question from the Unanswered Tab, select the question, then choose one of the 4 resolution types listed above.

Conversation history

View entire chatbot conversations from the History tab.

Here, you can see how many queries were associated with the conversation, the resolution status of the interaction, the user’s feedback, the number of links that were provided, and the time the conversation occurred.

To view a conversation, head to your Dialpad Admin Settings.

1. Select Channels & IVR

2. Select Ai Agents

3. Choose the desired Ai Agent

4. Select History

   

Use the search bar to find conversations with specific users, or filter by label tags to find conversations on a specific topic. The date selector in the right-hand corner allows you to select specific timeframes.

To view a conversation, simply select it. A pop-up containing the conversation transcript and metadata will appear on the right-hand sidebar.

On the Metadata tab, you’ll find not only the customer’s details, but also the conversation ID and labels.

Frequently asked questions

How do customers connect to Digital Contact Center agents?

Once the Ai Agent is connected to your Webchat channel, when a customer says ‘I want to speak to an agent’ they’re automatically escalated into your Digital Contact Center.

What languages does Generative Ai Assistance support?

Generative Ai Assistance is currently available in English, but stay tuned as we’re continuously adding new functionality.