Getting Started Guide ~18 min read

Write Better Replies with AI

Converge Converge Team

AI in Converge works at two levels. Beside your agents, it drafts replies, tightens rough notes, and translates in 18 languages. In front of your customers, it can answer unassigned conversations by itself using facts you approved, and hand the thread to a human the moment it is unsure. This guide covers both, plus the knowledge base that keeps the answers accurate.

Who can do what? Every team member can use AI suggestions, polish, transform, and translation from the chat window. The AI section in the sidebar (the sparkles icon) opens for Admin / Owner Only roles, and saving AI settings or an API key is Owner Only .

How Do You Get AI Reply Suggestions?

When your message input is empty and the last message is from the customer, AI can draft a reply for you. It reads the last 10 messages in the conversation and generates a contextual response that matches your company's tone settings and any approved knowledge base facts that fit the question.

How to get a suggestion

  1. 1
    Open a conversation with a customer message

    The AI suggest button only appears when the last message is from the customer and your input field is empty.

  2. 2
    Click the sparkles icon or press the shortcut

    Look for the sparkles icon (✦) in the message toolbar. Or use the keyboard shortcut: Cmd+Shift+S on Mac, Ctrl+Shift+S on Windows/Linux.

  3. 3
    Review and edit the suggestion

    The AI-generated text fills your input field. Read it, adjust anything that doesn't sound right, and send when ready.

Chat input with the AI Suggest button visible in the toolbar, ready to generate a reply suggestion based on the customer's question

Quick Reply matching and caching

While generating a suggestion, AI also checks your Quick Reply library. If one of your existing templates fits the customer's question, it is suggested instead of newly generated text, which keeps responses consistent with your pre-approved messaging.

Caching: Suggestions are cached for 5 minutes per conversation. If you open the same conversation twice within that window, you'll get the same suggestion without a new API call. The cache resets when a new message arrives.

Pro Tip: Build a solid Quick Reply library first. AI matches against your templates before generating from scratch, giving you more predictable and on-brand responses.
Success Check: You've generated your first AI suggestion. The sparkles icon appeared, you clicked it, and a contextual reply filled your input field.

How Do Polish and Transform Work?

Polish and Transform edit what you already typed. Once there is text in the input, the icon changes from sparkles to a wand, and the behavior depends on how much you've written. Both modes keep your draft in the language you wrote it in.

Polish Mode

When your draft is ≤100 characters

Light touch improvements. Fixes grammar, spelling, and minor tone issues. Your structure and length stay the same. Think of it as a quick proofread before hitting send.

Transform Mode

When your draft is >100 characters

Full restructure into a professional support reply: it acknowledges the issue, explains the cause, and lays out next steps, following your Formatting and Custom Instructions settings.

Using Polish or Transform

  1. 1
    Type your draft in the message input

    Write whatever comes to mind. The AI will handle the polishing or restructuring.

  2. 2
    Click the wand icon

    The wand icon replaces the sparkles when text is present. The tooltip shows "Polish" for short text or "Transform" for longer text.

  3. 3
    Review the result

    The processed text replaces your draft. Check that it captures your intent, then send.

Message input showing a rough draft with the Transform button highlighted in the toolbar, ready to polish the response into a professional message
Pro Tip: Use Transform when you've jotted down key points but don't have time to format them. Your Custom Instructions control the opening and closing wording, so the same greeting and sign-off come out every time.
Success Check: You've used both Polish (short text fix) and Transform (full restructure) on your drafts. The wand icon appeared and the processed text replaced your original input.

How Does the AI Answer Customers on Its Own?

Owner Only

Beyond drafting for agents, the AI can answer customers directly. One setting — Autonomy — decides whether it does, and how cautious it is when it does. Everything below applies to conversations nobody has claimed yet.

The three autonomy modes

Mode What the AI does
Off Drafts suggestions for agents on request and nothing else. It never sends a message to a customer.
Conservative Replies automatically only when the answer comes from an approved knowledge base fact, the model is confident, and it hasn't flagged the message as needing a person. Everything else goes to a human.
Balanced Also answers confident general questions that have no knowledge base match. It still hands off when unsure or when the customer asks for a person.

Only unassigned conversations

The AI answers a thread only while no agent is assigned to it. The moment somebody is assigned — by you, by auto-routing, or by the AI's own handoff — the AI stops replying on that conversation and it belongs to the person holding it. There is no AI agent seat and no AI row in your team list; an unassigned conversation is the only thing the AI ever owns.

Customers can tell an AI wrote it

Every message the AI sends on its own carries a 🤖 marker at the front, so the customer knows a machine answered. Replies that an agent generated, read, and sent are not marked, because a person reviewed those words and chose to send them. Inside the inbox, autonomous messages also carry a small "AI" badge so your team can see at a glance which turns it handled.

What happens at handoff

When the AI is not confident, when the customer asks for a human, or when a limit is reached, it hands the conversation over rather than guessing. Three things happen together: an available agent is assigned, the team is notified (the assigned agent gets the same notification as a manual assignment; if nobody is available, owners and admins get the alert instead), and the customer receives a short message in their own language telling them they're being transferred. That transfer notice is fixed wording, not model output, so it works even when the model produced nothing usable.

The limits that keep it honest

10 AI replies in a row, then a person

After 10 consecutive AI replies with no agent stepping in, the conversation is handed to a human. Any agent reply resets the count, so the limit bounds an uninterrupted AI-only stretch, not the length of the relationship.

30 AI runs per customer per day

A daily ceiling per customer, counted separately for each one so a single noisy thread cannot exhaust the budget of a legitimate one.

Off-topic requests get declined

Homework, creative writing, coding help, and general chat get a short, polite decline in the customer's language instead of an answer. Your support inbox does not become a free general-purpose assistant.

One answer per burst

A customer firing off four messages in a row gets one reply covering all of them. If an agent takes over or the customer changes the question mid-generation, the half-written reply is dropped rather than sent.

Always on, every channel

There is no schedule and no per-channel switch. The AI answers at 3am and it answers on every platform you've connected, because out-of-hours is exactly when nobody is there to reply, and a customer on WhatsApp deserves an answer as much as one on the widget. It knows your working hours and who is online, so it won't promise an immediate transfer when the office is closed. If you want it quiet, set Autonomy to Off — that is the switch.

Success Check: You've picked an autonomy mode and understand the handoff: only unassigned threads, a 🤖 marker on autonomous replies, and a human the moment the AI is unsure.

What Is the AI Knowledge Base?

Admin / Owner Only

The knowledge base is the set of company facts your AI is allowed to answer from — check-in times, refund windows, which plans include which features. When a customer asks something, matching facts are pulled in and the AI answers from them instead of inventing a plausible-sounding response. It lives under the AI icon in the sidebar, in the Knowledge tab.

Facts reach the knowledge base three ways: you type them, the AI proposes them from a real conversation, or you upload a document. Only the first lands live immediately. The other two land in a review queue, and nothing the AI proposed grounds a single reply until a person approves it.

The Knowledge tab listing eight approved facts, each marked Permanent or Time-limited, with one flagged as expiring soon and another showing how many times it has been used to answer a customer

Adding a fact by hand

Open the Knowledge tab and click Add. Give the fact a short title (the topic) and a one-to-three-sentence body (the answer an agent would reuse). Facts you write yourself are approved on the spot and start grounding answers straight away. You can also mark a fact as time-limited and give it an end date — a lift out of service until Friday, a seasonal price — and it retires itself when that date passes instead of quietly going stale.

Scanning a conversation for reusable facts

Good answers are already being typed by your team every day. Open any conversation, click the menu in the chat header, and choose Scan for knowledge. The AI reads both sides of the thread and proposes up to three reusable facts. You'll also be offered a scan when you resolve a conversation, with a "Don't ask again" option if you'd rather trigger it yourself. Proposals land as pending — nothing is added to the knowledge base by scanning alone.

The chat header menu open on a live conversation, showing the Scan for knowledge option below the Open and Resolved status choices

Importing a document

If your policies already live in a handbook, upload it. Click Import document in the Knowledge tab and pick a PDF, Word (.docx), plain text, or Markdown file up to 10 MB. Converge reads the text, splits it into sections, and distills each one into candidate facts, tracking its progress section by section. When it finishes it reports how many facts it proposed and how many it merged into entries you already had. One import runs at a time per company, up to 10 per day.

Your file is never stored. The upload is parsed in memory and discarded — only the distilled facts are kept. File type is checked against the actual contents rather than the extension, so a renamed binary is rejected instead of parsed.

The Import a document dialog after a finished import, reporting that eleven entries were proposed and thirteen were merged into existing ones, ready for the Review tab

Working the review queue

Scanned and imported facts wait in the Review tab, which carries a badge with the number pending. Each row shows the proposed title and body, where it came from (a conversation, or the filename it was distilled from), and any expiry date. Approve it, edit it first if the wording needs work, or dismiss it. Approving is the step that lets a fact ground an answer.

The Review tab with three pending proposals discovered from conversations, one flagged as replacing an existing fact shown struck through, and approve, edit and dismiss buttons on each row

When a new fact contradicts an old one

Policies change and two staff members answer the same question differently. When an incoming fact disagrees with one already stored — "we close at 16:00" against "we close at 17:00" — Converge flags it as a replacement rather than merging the two or discarding the correction. The review row shows the old fact struck through beneath the new one, and approving retires the outdated version in the same click. Adding a fact by hand that contradicts an existing one gives you the same choice: replace it, or keep both when both are true (two branches, two sets of hours).

Pro Tip: Seed the knowledge base with your 10 most-asked questions before switching Autonomy to Conservative. Conservative mode replies only from approved facts, so an empty knowledge base means every conversation goes to a human.
Success Check: You've added a fact by hand, scanned a conversation, and approved a proposal from the Review tab. The pending badge dropped by one and the fact now appears in the Knowledge tab.

How Do You Translate with Context?

When a customer writes in a different language, a translate button appears next to their message. Translation is context-aware — it uses your company name and conversation history to produce accurate, natural translations across 18 supported languages.

Inbound and outbound translation

Inbound messages

When a customer message is in a different language, a translate button appears. Click it to see the translation inline, below the original text. The original message is always preserved.

Outbound messages

Type your reply in your language, then click the translate button on the send bar. Preview the translation before sending. A flag indicator on the send button shows the target language.

Translation works independently from suggest, polish, and transform. You can generate a suggestion with AI, then translate it before sending — the features compose naturally.

Pro Tip: Translation uses conversation context to handle industry-specific terms and your company name correctly. The more conversation history available, the more accurate the translation.
Success Check: You've translated an inbound customer message and sent a translated outbound reply. The original text was preserved alongside the translation.

Where Do You Configure Tone and Style?

Owner Only

AI output follows your company's style settings. Configure these once and every suggestion, transform, and autonomous reply will match your brand voice.

Finding AI settings

Click the AI icon in the sidebar (the sparkles icon) and stay on the Settings tab, the first of three alongside Knowledge and Review. Admins and owners can open the page; only an owner can save changes, and the Save button stays hidden until something is edited.

The four settings

Setting Options What it affects
Autonomy Off, Conservative, Balanced Whether the AI replies to customers itself, and how cautiously
Tone Professional, Friendly, Casual Overall voice of every AI response
Formatting Detailed, Minimal Structure depth in Transform mode — paragraphs and lists, or short and direct
Custom Instructions Free text, up to 200 characters Extra style guidance, including your greeting and sign-off wording
The AI Settings tab with the autonomy dropdown open on its three choices — Off, Conservative and Balanced — above the tone, formatting and custom instruction fields

Writing good Custom Instructions

Greeting and sign-off are not separate fields. Every company starts with a default instruction that opens with a brief greeting, ends with a short sign-off, and moves from acknowledgement to cause to next steps — reword it and the AI's openings and closings change with it. Add recurring rules here too: "Always mention our 24-hour support guarantee", "Keep replies under 3 sentences", "Never mention competitor products". You have 200 characters, so keep each rule short.

Success Check: You've set your autonomy mode, tone, formatting, and custom instructions. Every future AI response follows these preferences.

Why Bring Your Own API Key?

Owner Only

By default, AI features run on a shared key, which carries a platform-wide ceiling of 2,000 AI calls per company per day. Supplying your own API key removes that ceiling — your calls are billed to your provider account and are no longer counted against the Converge daily cap. It also gives you direct cost control, your own model choice, and a paper trail for compliance.

Setting up BYOK

  1. 1
    Get an API key from any OpenAI-compatible provider

    Converge works with any provider that exposes an OpenAI-compatible /chat/completions endpoint. Examples: OpenAI, OpenRouter, Cerebras, Groq, Together AI, or a self-hosted model.

  2. 2
    Open AI Settings

    Click the AI icon in the sidebar, stay on the Settings tab, and scroll to the AI Provider section.

  3. 3
    Configure your endpoint

    Set the Base URL to your provider's API base (e.g., https://api.openai.com/v1 — without /chat/completions). Set the Model to the model identifier your provider uses. Enter your API Key.

  4. 4
    Save

    Your key is encrypted at rest. All AI requests will now use your provider instead of the shared one.

When something goes wrong with your key

A key that has been revoked, an account that has run out of credit, and a provider throttling you all used to look identical from the agent's seat: a spinner that stopped. Each now produces its own message in the chat window, naming the cause, so an owner learns their key was rejected in seconds instead of days. A missing base URL or model is reported the same way. The same distinctions are recorded for autonomous replies, so a broken key never hides behind "the AI escalated".

Security: API keys are encrypted with per-company encryption keys before storage. They are never logged, never sent to the frontend, and are only decrypted server-side when making AI requests.

Success Check: Your API key is saved and encrypted. AI requests now use your provider, your billing, and your rate limits, outside the platform daily cap.

Best Practices & Tips

Feed the knowledge base before raising autonomy

Grounded answers are the difference between a helpful first responder and a confident guesser. Approve your most-asked facts first, then move Autonomy up from Off.

Review before sending, every time

A suggestion is a starting point. Verify facts, links, and promises before you hit send — once you send it, it is your message, not the AI's, and it carries no disclosure marker.

Work the review queue weekly

Pending proposals ground nothing. A short weekly pass through the Review tab turns the answers your team already wrote into answers the AI can reuse.

Build your Quick Reply library

AI matches against your Quick Replies before generating new text. A larger library means more consistent, pre-approved responses and less generated content to edit.

Set Custom Instructions to reduce edits

If your agents keep editing the same thing out of AI responses, write it as an instruction instead. One line there saves a correction on every interaction.

Rate limiting is per company

AI requests are throttled to one every 5 seconds per company to manage costs, and agent-facing requests jump the queue ahead of background work like document imports. BYOK accounts run on their own provider limits.

What's Next?

You're now equipped to use AI across your conversations. Here are some related features to explore:

  • Replies Guide — Build the Quick Reply library AI matches against, and turn auto-replies into handoff acknowledgments
  • Auto-Routing Guide — Decide which agent receives a conversation when the AI hands it off
  • Inbox Guide — Master conversation management, where you'll use AI most

Need more help?

Our support team is here for you. Click the chat widget in the bottom right corner to start a conversation.

We typically respond within minutes during business hours.