Quick start

It takes four steps to get from sign-up to a chat window on your website: create the account and confirm your address, set up the assistant and its knowledge, check it in the Test dialog, embed the chat window. The application lives at https://app.xicbot.de/; after sign-in its Overview shows which steps are still open. The Help button at the top of the application opens the documentation for the area you are in, in a new tab - from the Overview it opens this page.

Four steps to a working assistant

1. 1

   Step 1

   Create the account and confirm your address

   At https://app.xicbot.de/registrieren, or via Create account on the sign-in page, enter Company or project, Email address and a Password twice. A message with a confirmation link follows; the link is valid for 48 hours. Until the address is confirmed, assistants, knowledge, conversations and analytics stay locked. More in Sign-in, sign-up and access.

2. 2

   Step 2

   Set up the assistant and its knowledge

   The short route is Setup: enter the Address of your website, click Read website, review the Proposal and accept it with Create assistant. The website that was read becomes a knowledge source along the way. By hand, you create a New assistant under Assistants and a New source under Knowledge. More in Setup from your website and Maintain knowledge.

3. 3

   Step 3

   Check it in the test dialog

   Under Test dialog, click Start test dialog and ask questions the way a visitor would. For a check you can repeat, go to Acceptance, use Add check question to add questions with the expected answer, and click Start acceptance run. More in Test dialog and acceptance.

4. 4

   Step 4

   Embed the chat window

   Under Assistants, open the assistant, set Status in Basics to active and click Save. In the Chat window on your website section, tick Enable chat window, enter your website under Allowed domains and save. Copy embed code gives you the code; place it in the head of every page the window should appear on. More in Embed the widget.

The order is a dependency, not a suggestion. A new assistant answers only from its knowledge: without a knowledge source the answer stays empty, and the Test dialog says so with Without a knowledge source the answer stays empty - that is intended. On your website the chat window only answers once the assistant has the status active and Enable chat window is saved. If either is missing, the chat button disappears from the page; to visitors a paused assistant, one that is not enabled and an unknown one look the same. The key figures and Conversations per day on the Overview and the figures in Analytics come from conversations through the chat window on your website and via the API; test dialogs and acceptance runs are not counted there, but they do appear under Recent conversations.

None of the steps waits for approval from us. The account is active as soon as it is created, you confirm the address yourself via the link in the message, and you set the status and Enable chat window on the assistant yourself. An assistant can only take action, such as booking an appointment or creating a request, with tools that are switched on for it and included in your plan; without them it only answers. More in Tools.

The pages Setup, Assistants, Knowledge and Test dialog share the same Setup path bar with the stations Create, Connect knowledge, Test and Embed; the station of the page you are on is highlighted. Create leads to the form for a new assistant, Connect knowledge to Knowledge. Test and Embed carry the assistant you have selected; with none selected, Embed leads to the list of assistants. Once it is clear that no assistant exists yet, Embed is not a link but a dashed box with the note after step 1. On the Knowledge page the bar does not check whether an assistant exists yet: Embed stays a link to the list of assistants there, where you create one first.

Create the account and confirm your address

The Create account form is at https://app.xicbot.de/registrieren; the Create account button on the sign-in page leads there. Company or project, Email address, Password and Repeat password are required, and the password rule is At least 12 characters, including letters and digits. Whoever signs up becomes the Owner of the new account, Company or project becomes the account name, and the language you are viewing the page in becomes the language of the account and of its messages; a later sign-in changes it only if a language has been chosen on that device, and then sets it to that language. Every field, rule and message is covered in Creating an account.

A confirmation link then goes to your address; it is valid for 48 hours and works once. You can sign in before that, but the work areas stay locked: the banner Email address not confirmed yet appears at the top with the Send the message again button, which sends a new link and invalidates the older ones. If sending fails, The message did not go out. Please try again later. appears there, and the older links keep their validity period. What the Confirm your address page shows in each case is described under Confirming your address.

Set up the assistant and its knowledge

Using setup from your website

Setup sits in the navigation under Work. Under Address of your website, enter the full address starting with https:// or http://, for example https://example.com (255 characters at most), choose Deutsch or English under Language of the assistant and click Read website. While the run is going you first see The website is being read. Depending on its size this takes a few minutes., then The proposal is being written. One run per account can go at a time. The website that was read is added as a knowledge source and stays so even if you do not turn the proposal into an assistant. If the run ends without a result, you see No proposal or The run failed, followed by the reason where one is known.

The Proposal consists of lines: Every line can be edited or dropped. Only what you leave standing is accepted.

• Name of the assistant - required, 80 characters at most
• What your business does (600 characters at most) and Who the assistant represents (200 characters at most)
• How it speaks - a choice of factual, friendly, brief and detailed, preset to factual; the tone the run found on your website is shown below as a hint after Suggestion from your website:. The chosen level goes into the first version.
• Its opening line - the greeting, 300 characters at most
• Questions and answers - each with its Source page on your website; an answer without evidence is marked No verified source page - not accepted
• Topics it stays silent on
• Gaps on your website - questions your website has no answer to; they are a pointer for you, are not accepted and stay in place after creation as Open gaps from the setup

Create assistant builds the assistant, and The assistant has been created. appears with the buttons Open assistant and Start another run. The new assistant is set to Draft, answers only from its knowledge, and its first version is already published. This version is created in the language you chose at the start; the fallback answer and the handover rule come from the template for that language. You change Language and Handover rule under Assistants in a new version, the Fallback answer in Basics. More in Setup from your website.

Creating things by hand

Under Assistants you find the New assistant form:

Create assistant creates the assistant with the status Draft; its first version is already published, and it answers only from its knowledge. More in Create and maintain assistants. The name also serves as the heading above the chat window unless Heading in the window says otherwise. You can change the name, tone and handover rule later under Assistants; knowledge sources are maintained separately under Knowledge.

Knowledge is added under Knowledge via New source. Under Type of source you pick Text, File, Website or Questions and answers. Label is required (200 characters at most); a website also needs the Start address (500 characters at most), from which up to 25 pages are read. Addresses that do not point to the open internet are rejected. Add source creates the source. More in Maintain knowledge.

Check it in the test dialog

The Test dialog sits in the navigation under Work; its address is https://app.xicbot.de/probe. With several assistants you pick one under Assistant; with a single one you see Testing: followed by its name. If you come via Test in the Setup path, the selected assistant is already set. Start test dialog opens a conversation with the assistant's greeting. Below it you type into Your message (4000 characters at most) and click Send; while the answer is being written you see Answering …, and Cancel stops it; whatever had been written up to that point stays in the dialog.

• Without an assistant you see A test dialog needs an assistant. with Create an assistant first. You can then try it out here. and the Create assistant button.
• Without a knowledge source you see Without a knowledge source the answer stays empty - that is intended. above the dialog.
• If no answer can be produced, the stored Fallback answer comes instead, and fallback answer appears below the dialog.
• If the quota is used up, the stored Fallback answer comes as well, and quota used up appears below the dialog. More in Plans, quotas and billing.
• After the first answer you see If the assistant answers well, the next step is embedding it on your website. with the Embed the widget link to the assistant.
• Open this conversation in the list opens the conversation under Conversations; New test dialog starts over.
• Every test dialog you start is a conversation in the account and so ticks off Run your first test dialog on the Overview.
• Below each answer you see its sources: number, document and section of the passage it was drawn from. With more than three sources, more reveals the rest.
• Ask ten to twenty questions the way your customers actually phrase them. If the Fallback answer comes although quota is left, or an answer shows no source below it, the content is usually missing from the knowledge: add it to a source rather than rewording the question.

The check becomes repeatable with Acceptance under Records: check questions with their expected answer run against the published version of the assistant. A run makes sense before going live and after changes to the assistant or its knowledge. As long as no check question exists, you see No check question yet. More in Test dialog and acceptance.

Embed the chat window

For the chat window to answer on your website, three things must be in place on the assistant under Assistants:

• In Basics, Status is set to active and stored with Save. A new assistant is set to Draft, and a paused one does not answer either.
• Under Chat window on your website, Enable chat window is ticked and saved: Only with this setting does the snippet answer on other sites. Without it, it stays inert. A new assistant starts with the box unticked.
• The embed code sits in the head of every page the window should appear on. You find it under Embed code via our address; Copy embed code puts it on the clipboard.

Allowed domains (500 characters at most) decides where the window may be embedded: One per line. Subdomains are included. Empty means any website may embed the window. If your website is missing from a filled-in list, the chat button still appears, but opening the window shows “This chat is not enabled for this website.” The recommended route is Embed code via your own address: As soon as an own path is entered above and saved, the matching embed code appears here. The window runs in its own frame and can neither read nor change the page it sits on. More in Embed the widget and Widget settings.

The overview after sign-in

After sign-in the application opens the Overview at https://app.xicbot.de/; if you came to sign-in from an invitation, you are taken back to Accept invitation instead. At the top you see Welcome, followed by your name or, if none is stored, your email address. Below come five key figures, the Setup card while anything is open, the Conversations per day and What is set up cards, and Recent conversations. Everything below the key figures only appears once the data has loaded. If a request fails, the affected card shows the reason - before confirmation, for example, This area stays locked until the email address is confirmed. - and the other cards are not affected.

The Setup card

The Setup card shows progress as a sentence at the top, for example 1 of 4 steps done, with a bar below it. Next steps lists only the open steps, numbered in order; each one links to the page where it gets done. Completed steps drop out of the list and only count towards the progress.

• As long as there is no assistant, Embed the widget is not a link but a dashed box with after step 1; it still counts towards the progress.
• If the number of conversations cannot be fetched, Run your first test dialog is left out entirely, and the progress counts three steps instead of a guessed value.
• If the assistants or the knowledge sources cannot be fetched, the card does not appear at all; the reason is shown under What is set up.
• Once every step is done and no processing is running, the card disappears.

Adding your website directly

As long as the account has no knowledge source, the card shows the field Add your website with the hint The address of your website. The assistant reads the pages and answers from them. Typing example.com is enough; without http:// or https:// the application adds https://. The Add source button cannot be clicked while the field is empty and shows Processing … while sending. The result is a knowledge source of type Website, named after the website's host name without www.; up to 25 pages are read from there. The field does not create an assistant. If adding fails, the reason appears below the field.

After that the card shows Processing and, below it, every source with its label (or Untitled), its state and, once known, Documents and Passages. The states:

The application asks for the current state every four seconds, 60 times at most, so for about four minutes. A single failed request does not end this; the last known state stays on screen. Once no source is new or processing any more, the heading changes to Processing finished. If processing is already running when you open the Overview, it is followed in the same way. After 60 requests the asking stops and the last state stays on screen. If that state still shows processing running, the sentence The status is no longer updated automatically. Reload the page to see the current status. appears below Processing.

The five key figures

The key figures cover the last seven days including today, counted in your browser's time zone (Europe/Berlin as a fallback), and carry the note 7 days. On a phone they sit in two columns, with the fifth tile taking the whole row; on wide screens all five sit side by side. All assistants of the account are counted; test dialogs and acceptance runs are not. The figures are cached for up to a minute, so a conversation that just took place may be missing for a moment. If the browser reports an older name for a zone, such as Asia/Calcutta, the service calculates with today's name, here Asia/Kolkata. If the service does not recognise the zone, each tile and Conversations per day show The service does not recognise the time zone of this device. The figures cannot be assigned to days and are therefore not shown. instead of a figure.

The key figures in detail and over longer periods are covered in Analytics.

Conversations per day, inventory and recent conversations

More on conversations in Conversations, on the layout of the application in The application.

Which role can do what

Whoever creates an account is its Owner. With the Read role, Setup, Assistants, Knowledge, Acceptance and Test dialog, as well as the Add your website field on the Overview, show With the Read role this area is view-only. Changes need at least the Edit role., and their forms are locked. In the Test dialog the sentence appears even when no assistant has been created yet; locked there are Start test dialog, the choice under Assistant, the Your message field and Send, while Cancel and New test dialog stay usable. Roles are assigned in Team, roles and audit log.

Messages along the way

The other messages, for example about your plan, too many attempts, a locked account or an unreachable service, are listed under Messages in the work areas.

Frequent questions