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AI Assistants: Your Always-Available Digital Team

AI Assistants help you answer questions, qualify leads, collect information, and guide customers across your connected channels. Each assistant can have its own purpose, tone, knowledge, and actions, so it represents your business consistently.

Create an Assistant

  1. Open AI Assistants in your workspace.
  2. Select Create.
  3. Choose the company and AI model the assistant should use.
  4. Give it a clear name and description.
  5. Add instructions that explain its role, boundaries, policies, and brand voice.
  6. Save the assistant, attach relevant knowledge, and test a few realistic conversations.

Start with one focused assistant for a clear use case, such as sales enquiries, customer support, or onboarding. You can add specialist assistants as your needs grow.

Core Settings

Name and Description

Use a name your team can recognize and a description that states what the assistant is responsible for. For example, “Sales Assistant” is clearer than “Assistant 1.”

Conversation Tone

Describe how replies should sound, such as “warm and professional,” “brief and direct,” or “patient and reassuring.” Add more detailed brand and policy guidance in System Instructions.

Active

Turn the assistant off when you are still preparing it or need to pause it temporarily. An inactive assistant will not handle new conversations.

Reasoning Controls

Enable AI Thinking lets the assistant spend more effort working through a request before it replies. This can improve answers for requests that require judgement, several steps, or careful comparison, but it may use more credits and take longer.

Choose the reasoning effort that fits the assistant’s work:

  • Low — best for quick, routine conversations.
  • Medium — a balance of speed and deeper reasoning.
  • High — best for complex requests where answer quality matters more than speed.

Begin with Low, which is the default, then increase it only when your tests show a clear benefit.

Images and Voice Notes

Turn on Enable Media Handling when customers should be able to send images, audio, or voice notes.

You can add Phonic Watch Words for brand names, product names, locations, or industry terms that may be difficult to transcribe accurately. You can also provide media instructions, such as what details to look for in a product image or how to summarize a voice note.

When Process Media in Main AI Request is enabled, a compatible assistant can consider the customer’s image or voice note together with the conversation. This is useful when the meaning depends on both the media and the surrounding messages. Test this option with the model you selected before using it in live conversations.

Forms and Customer Details

Turn on Enable Form Handling when the assistant should collect structured information such as contact details, registrations, preferences, or booking requests.

When a conversation opens a WhatsApp Form, information already provided by the customer can be carried into matching fields. The customer can review or change the details instead of starting over. See AI Form Builder for setup guidance.

External Tools

Turn on Enable External Tools when the assistant needs live information or needs to perform an action in another system, such as checking an order, looking up availability, or creating a support request.

Only connect tools the assistant genuinely needs. Start with read-only actions, write a clear description of when each tool should be used, and test with realistic and incomplete customer requests before going live. See Agent Tools.

Knowledge Base

Attach focused, up-to-date documents that answer the questions this assistant is expected to handle:

  1. Open the assistant.
  2. Go to Knowledge Base Documents.
  3. Attach the relevant documents.
  4. Make sure each required document is active.
  5. Use priority to place your most authoritative information first.

Avoid attaching unrelated or conflicting documents. Smaller, well-organized sources are easier to maintain and produce more consistent answers.

Test Before Going Live

Test the complete customer experience, not only a perfect question:

  • Ask common questions in different ways.
  • Try incomplete, ambiguous, and misspelled messages.
  • Send a sample image or voice note if media handling is enabled.
  • Confirm that forms retain details already shared in the conversation.
  • Check that tools use the correct customer information and explain results clearly.
  • Verify that the assistant follows your escalation and human-handover rules.

Review live conversations regularly and improve the instructions or knowledge when you notice repeated gaps.

Connect the Assistant to a Channel

After testing, connect the assistant to the channel where customers will use it:

Troubleshooting

Answers do not use your business information

  • Confirm the correct knowledge documents are attached and active.
  • Remove outdated or conflicting sources.
  • Make the system instructions more specific about which policies to follow.

Replies are slow or use more credits than expected

  • Reduce Reasoning Effort for routine assistants.
  • Disable direct media processing if it is not needed for the use case.
  • Keep attached knowledge focused on the assistant’s role.

A form does not open or retain customer details

  • Confirm Enable Form Handling is on.
  • Make sure the form is published and its trigger clearly describes when it should be used.
  • Check that the information collected in conversation matches fields in the form.

If the issue continues, contact Nviti support with the channel, assistant name, and approximate conversation time. Do not send customer passwords or private access keys.

Keywords

AI assistants, customer support assistant, reasoning effort, voice notes, image handling, form handling, knowledge base, external tools