A bot is what your visitors talk to. Create one under Bots → New bot, and change it any time with Edit. Team admins create and edit bots; everyone on the team can preview them.
The Free plan includes 1 bot. The Team plan has no limit, so you can have, say, a support bot for your shop and an Ask console for your docs.
Support chat or Ask console#
Every bot has a Mode, under Human handoff:
- Support chat: a chat bubble in the corner of your site. Visitors have a conversation with the bot, and a Talk to a human button hands the conversation to your team. Best for shops and services, where visitors have questions about orders, shipping or pricing.
- Ask console: a search box for your docs site. Visitors type a question and get a short answer with links to the exact pages. It's for finding the right page fast, not for long conversations. Best for software docs and help centers.
You can install either on your site: see Installing on your website.
Basics#
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name | What visitors see in the chat, like "Acme Help". |
| Handle | Used in your embed code and links: letters, numbers, dashes and underscores. Leave it blank to make one from the name. |
| Public | Anyone can use the bot, including on your website. Off, only your team can. Bots start private. |
| Default bot | Shown once you have more than one bot. The default bot answers in Slack and in chats where no bot is chosen. |
| Knowledge sources | The knowledge this bot answers from. See Adding knowledge. |
| Use general knowledge | On (the default), the bot can also answer from what the AI model knows in general. Off, it only answers from your knowledge. |
| Show source citations | Link each answer to the pages it came from. |
| Extra context | How many neighboring passages to read around each match. Higher can give better answers but costs more. 2 is a good default. |
| Extra instructions | Tone and format, like "Keep answers short." or "Always reply in Spanish." |
AI#
Bots answer with tufu's AI, included in your plan. On Team you pick its model and reasoning:
- Model: Claude Haiku 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Opus 5.5. Claude Haiku 5.5 answers support questions well; stronger models cost more answers and reply slower.
- Reasoning: off, low, medium or high, how much the model thinks before answering. Higher can help with hard questions but is slower and costs more answers.
Each option shows how many answers one reply counts (the table). New bots start on Claude Haiku 5.5 with reasoning off. On Free, bots answer with Claude Haiku 5.5, reasoning off, and the pickers are locked.
You can also add your own AI key and pick any of its provider's models and a reasoning level for each bot, on either plan: answers on your key aren't counted against tufu's AI (see Bring your own model). When your team has a key, the section starts with Runs on: tufu's AI, or one of your keys.
Human handoff#
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Mode | Support chat or Ask console (see above). |
| Let visitors ask for a human | Shows the Talk to a human button, and lets the bot hand off by itself when it can't help. |
| Handoff button label | Leave blank for "Talk to a human". |
| Message shown while waiting for a human | Leave blank for a friendly default. |
| Ask for the visitor's email before handing off | So your reply can reach them by email if they leave the page. On by default. |
How handoff works, and how you reply, is in Human handoff and the inbox.
Ask console#
Shown when the mode is Ask console.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Suggested questions | One per line, shown before the visitor asks anything. |
| "Still stuck?" chat bot | A public support chat bot with human handoff. The console links to it when your docs don't help. |
Where it appears#
Which websites can show the bot, and which pages it shows on. See Where your bot appears.
Look#
Colors, the chat button, the greeting and suggested questions, your logo and branding live on the bot's Appearance page, with a live preview on a page like yours. Leave them alone and the chat follows tufu's theme in light and dark mode. More in Customizing the support chat.
Slack#
Once Slack is connected, three more settings choose where the bot answers in your workspace: mentions in public channels, mentions in private channels, and direct messages. See Slack.
Trying it out#
- Preview shows the bot as visitors will see it, as a support chat or an Ask console, on desktop or phone, with the embed snippets for your site. Conversations there are a sandbox: they never reach your inbox or reports, and a handoff there pings nobody. The bot's replies there still count toward your plan's answers.
- Chat opens a full-page chat with the bot.