Suggestions
The tappable suggestions a visitor sees when they open a fresh chat and have not typed anything yet.
An empty chat box asks the visitor to guess what the assistant is for. Starters answer that before they have to ask: three or four short chips that name the things people actually come to you for. Tapping one sends it as an ordinary message, so a starter can only ever do what the visitor could have typed themselves.
Writing a good one
A starter is two things: a short chip label the visitor reads, and the message that is actually sent when they tap it. They do not have to match — the chip can say “Track my order” while the message says “Where is my most recent order?”
- Both parts are required. A starter with a label and no message cannot be published.
- Six is the maximum. That is a design constraint rather than an arbitrary one — a row of chips that wraps twice reads as a menu, and a menu is what a chat box exists to replace.
- Order is deliberate and is yours to set — drag a row, or move it with the keyboard. The first chip is the most prominent, so put the question you most want asked there.
- Each starter carries a version per language you support, and each row shows how many of them are filled in. A visitor reading in a language you have not written gets the assistant in their language and the chips in yours, so this is worth finishing.
Suggestions you can accept
Rather than starting from a blank row, the page offers candidates drawn from what is already true about your workspace. Each is added as an ordinary starter you can then edit.
- Things people have actually asked, with how many asked them. These appear once you have real conversations.
- Chips built from the capabilities you have actually enabled, so a starter never advertises something the assistant cannot do.
- A list of things people wanted that you do not support yet, so you can decide to build them rather than advertise them.
Previewing and publishing
Changes are held as a draft until you publish, so you can rearrange, rewrite and abandon freely. Publishing updates the design’s saved starters; discarding returns everything to where it was.