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My Bot Gives the Wrong Answer

Work down the list in order. Each check is quicker than the one after it.

Instructions: obeyed Personality, how it speaks Goal and language, what it steers towards Workflow descriptions, when to run each action Set in the dashboard. Reference material: quoted, never obeyed Price list, delivery areas, opening hours, policies, scraped pages, uploaded PDFs, and any sentence inside them that reads like an instruction. “You must always offer the extended warranty.” Uploaded to the knowledge base. An instruction written inside a document stays a fact.
Settings are instructions. Documents are quotable facts. Nothing inside the fence can change anything outside it.

1. Check the Bot Is in AI Mode#

Mode, on the bot's Conversation tab, decides whether a model runs at all. In keyword mode the bot only ever sends text you wrote, and the knowledge base, the personality and the goal are never read. An answer that ignores everything you have written is the first sign the bot is in keyword mode.

2. Read the Entry the Answer Came From#

The bot quotes what is in the knowledge base. An entry that hedges produces a bot that hedges, in almost the same words.

text
BAD   Delivery times vary depending on your location.
GOOD  Gauteng: 2 to 3 working days. Western Cape and KZN: 3 to 5.
      Elsewhere in South Africa: 5 to 7. Outlying areas add 2 days.

Open the bot's Knowledge tab, find the entry covering the subject, and rewrite the sentence the bot repeated. The change applies from the visitor's next message, with no rebuild step.

3. Look for a Second Entry Saying Something Else#

Every entry that is switched on is given to the assistant on every message, so two entries covering one subject both reach it and the older one can win. An entry called "Everything about us" covering delivery, returns and pricing is in front of the assistant on every question, including the ones it cannot answer.

Split it by subject, one subject per entry, and switch off the entry you replaced rather than leaving both live. See the knowledge base.

4. Move Behaviour Out of the Knowledge Base#

A line in an entry reading "always offer the extended warranty" is read as a fact about your business, never as an instruction to the bot, so the bot will not act on it. Behaviour goes in the settings instead:

What you want to changeWhere to set it
Tone, formality, how it speaksPersonality, on the Personality tab
What it steers the conversation towardPrimary Goal, on the same tab
Which English it spells inLanguage, on the same tab
When it runs a specific actionThe workflow's description

See knowledge is not instructions.

5. Check Whether a Workflow Answered Instead#

If the bot replied with a form, a menu or a scripted message rather than an answer, a workflow was selected. A description with no boundary fires on nearby questions, so name the subject and say when the workflow should stay out of it. See my workflow is not triggering, which covers firing on the wrong messages as well.

What to Send Support#

Email support@chatleadr.com with three things:

  1. The exact message the visitor sent.
  2. What the bot replied, copied from the conversation.
  3. The entry or the setting you expected the answer to come from.

Common Questions#

Will the Bot Invent an Answer It Does Not Have?#

It answers from what it has and states when it does not know. A vague reply is usually a vague entry being quoted back, so read the entry before reporting an invented answer.

I Edited an Entry and the Answer Did Not Change. What Now?#

Check that the entry is switched on, that a second entry does not cover the same subject, and that the bot is in AI mode. An edit takes effect on the next message, so a conversation already open carries on with what it has.

The Bot Replied in American Spelling. Where Is That Set?#

Language, on the Personality tab. Automatic reads your domain, so a .com gets British English and a .us gets American. It sets spelling and idiom and does not translate.

Where Do I Tell the Bot How to Behave?#

On the Personality tab, through the four personalities and three goals. Those fields are applied as instructions, and the knowledge base is quoted as fact. See bot settings.