Activation

Now that you have created a chatbot it's time to activate it to get it live.

When activating your chatbot, Answers will run a quick check on your chatbot and let you of anything which is standing in the way. These will come back in the form of warnings, which you can override, and errors, which you need to fix.

Make sure to check out the troubleshooting and FAQs on how to fix common warnings and errors.

New chatbots

Once you have finished building and configuring your chatbot, simply use the Activate button at the top right of the screen to go live.

Any errors you run into will need to be resolved before you can complete activation. Use the clickable items in the issues list to go straight to it to fix it.

Active chatbots can be deactivated using the same option, now named Deactivate  See the docs on chatbot administration to learn more about chatbot statuses and how to manage them.

Redeployment

To make changes to an active chatbot and to redeploy the chatbot using the same sender, make the required changes and add a grace period so that open sessions will have time to finish.

For more information, refer to the Administration > Redeployment topic.

Troubleshooting

Check out some of the most frequent troubleshooting fixes below if you are running into any issues when activating.

Intents

Number of training phrases in Intent higher or lower than others

The system has detected that the number of training phrases for one of your intents is substantially higher or lower than for others. Make sure to use similar numbers of training phrases across intents to allow the chatbot to work efficiently

Dialogs

Button message must not be empty

You are using the button channel element and you have not provided any text values to appear along with the button. Go back to Dialogs and give your button message text

Button caption must not be empty

You are using the button channel element and you have not provided any text values to appear inside the button. Go back to Dialogs and give your button caption text

Button action URL must not be empty

You are using the button channel element and you have not provided a URL when called to action. Go back to Dialogs and provide your button with a valid URL

Settings

Chatbot channel and sender must be defined

You have not selected a channel and/or sender for your chatbot. Go back to Settings and select a sender. Senders can only be used in one chatbot

Keywords

At least 1 synonym should be defined

You have not provided any synonyms for your keywords. You need to supply at least one synonym for each keyword for the chatbot to pick up on, e.g. yes | yeah | yep | yh. Go back to Keywords and add synonyms