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Agent bots

An agent bot connects your own automation or external AI agent directly to a ChannelX inbox. The bot listens to live conversations, processes incoming questions, and replies through ChannelX in real time — all while keeping a clean path to hand off to a human when needed.

When a bot is attached to an inbox, every new conversation starts in pending status. ChannelX delivers conversation events to the bot's webhook URL, the bot decides how to respond using your own logic or AI systems, and it posts replies back through the ChannelX API. This is how you bring a custom bot or automation workflow into the platform without giving up human oversight.

How an agent bot works

A typical bot follows this flow:

  1. It receives events such as widget_triggered, message_created, and message_updated as customers interact.
  2. It processes the incoming information and decides on a response.
  3. It can call external system APIs to enrich the answer — for example, looking up an order status or a booking.
  4. It can use AI models such as OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini, or tools like Amazon Lex, to interpret what the customer is asking.
  5. It posts its reply back into the widget using ChannelX message APIs.
  6. It can switch a conversation to open to hand it to a human agent.
  7. It keeps watching open conversations so it can surface useful context to the human handling them.

Human-agent handoff

Because bot conversations start as pending, the bot gets a chance to triage before a person is involved. If the bot decides a human is needed — or the customer explicitly asks for one — it changes the status to open, which makes the conversation available to agents.

Agents can also push a conversation back into the bot queue. Setting the status back to pending returns it to the bot.

When to use an agent bot

A few common patterns:

  • High-volume support teams use a bot to authenticate and filter queries, cutting the load on human agents.
  • E-commerce sites connect the bot to their order database to give customers live shipping and order updates.
  • Content and news sites use bots to push recommendations as card messages.
  • Booking sites (hotels, cinemas) let the bot handle reservations and related questions end to end.

Creating an agent bot

  1. Go to Settings → Bots.
  2. Click Add Bot and provide a name, an avatar, and a webhook URL.

Connecting a bot to an inbox

  1. Open the inbox you want the bot to manage.
  2. Under Bot Configuration, choose the bot.
  3. Click Save. From then on, the bot's webhook URL receives an event each time a conversation or message is created.

For the full list of supported events, see Webhooks.

Webhook verification

When you create a bot, ChannelX generates a secret you can use to confirm that incoming payloads genuinely came from ChannelX and were not tampered with. See the verification section in Webhooks for how to validate the signature.

Note

The bot is responsible for its own intelligence — ChannelX delivers the events and accepts the replies, but the decision logic, AI model, and any external lookups all live in your application.