Channels: Overview

• A channel carries the conversations between your users and an agent of your app: user messages reach the agent through the channel, and replies return the same way.
  Quill offers four channel types: a chat widget on your site, or a bot on Telegram, Slack, or Discord, reaching your users where they already are.

• Each channel type has an article of its own, describing how a channel of this type is added, and what the channel's users encounter.
  This article covers what applies to channels of every type.

• In this article:

  • Channel types
  • Channels and agents
  • Adding and managing channels
  • Binding agent parameters
  • Behavior and limitations common to all channels
  • Troubleshooting

Channel types

Quill offers four channel types, each carrying the conversations through a different medium.
A channel's type is selected in the Add channel menu, described in Adding and managing channels:

• Web widget
  A chat widget embedded in a page of your site, which your users open through an embed link placed on the page.
  See Getting started: Adding a chat widget.
• Telegram bot
  A bot that your users chat with on Telegram, created using @BotFather.
  See Channels: Telegram bot.
• Slack
  A Slack app that the members of a Slack workspace message directly.
  Slack delivers the users' messages to your Quill deployment, so the deployment must be reachable from the internet.
  See Channels: Slack bot.
• Discord
  A bot that the members of a Discord server message directly, created in the Discord Developer Portal.
  See Channels: Discord bot.

Channel type	Where your users chat	What you set up outside Quill	Quill reachable from the internet
Chat widget	On a page of your site	The embed snippet, in the page's HTML	Not required
Telegram bot	In Telegram	A bot, using @BotFather	Not required
Slack bot	In the Slack client	A Slack app, from Quill's manifest	Required
Discord bot	In Discord	A bot, in the Discord Developer Portal	Not required

Channels and agents

A channel is added for one of the app's agents, and carries conversations to this agent alone.
The following holds for channels of every type:

• An agent can serve several channels at once.
  e.g., a chat widget on your site and a Telegram bot, both answered by the same agent.
• A channel serves the agent it was added for.
  The agent cannot be changed afterwards. To serve another agent, add a new channel for this agent.
• A bot serves one channel.
  A Telegram, Slack, or Discord bot can be connected to a single channel, in a single app of the deployment; connecting the bot to another channel fails with an "already connected" error that names the app holding the bot.
  To connect a bot to a different channel, delete the channel that holds the bot and add a new channel for the bot.

Adding and managing channels

Channels of every type are added and managed in the same places of Quill's management dashboard, described in Dashboard: Channels view.

• Adding a channel starts with selecting the channel's type in the Add channel menu.
  The menu opens from the Channels view, from the channels list in the app's Overview, and at the last stage of the Add agent wizard, right after an agent is created.
  Selecting a type opens the type's form, described in the type's article.
• Once added, a channel is managed from its details view.
  The details view opens from the channel's box in the Channels view. The view's header carries the Pause/Resume button and the ⋮ menu with Edit and Delete, common to every channel type, and the tabs below the header are specific to the channel type.
  The tabs and the other type-specific parts of the view are described in the type's article.

Binding agent parameters

Some agents have parameters: values the agent's queries require, and that must come from the channel rather than be chosen by the LLM, like the phone number of the customer whose orders the agent looks up.
Agent parameters are bound by the channel, and the source of a parameter's value depends on the channel type:

• A bot channel binds each parameter when the channel is added, to a constant value or to a selected detail of each user who sends the channel a message; the user details that can be bound differ by platform, and are listed in each bot's article.
  A parameter left unbound, e.g., a parameter added to the agent after the channel was added, stops the bot from answering until the parameter is bound in the Parameters tab of the channel's details view.
• A chat widget binds the parameters into each embed link when the link is generated, and a link cannot be generated until every parameter has a value.

Behavior and limitations common to all channels

• Users need no account with Quill.
  Who can reach a channel depends on the channel type:

  • A chat widget is reached by whoever opens the page that holds its embed link.
  • A Telegram bot is reached by any Telegram user who finds it.
  • A Slack bot is reached by the members of the workspace the bot is installed in.
  • A Discord bot is reached by the members of a server the bot is in.

• The reply is streamed into the chat as the agent composes it.

• A long answer is delivered in several messages.
  On Telegram, Slack, and Discord, an answer that exceeds the platform's message limit is split across several messages.
  In a chat widget the whole answer appears in a single reply.

• Quill keeps the conversation's context, so a follow-up question is understood against the earlier exchange.
  The duration of a conversation depends on the channel type:

  Channel type	The conversation lasts	A user can end it sooner
  Chat widget	As long as the embed link that opened the widget	No
  Telegram bot	Until midnight UTC	Yes, by sending /clear
  Slack bot	Until midnight UTC	No
  Discord bot	Until midnight UTC	No

  • On Telegram, Slack, and Discord, the agent remembers a conversation for one day at most: at midnight UTC the agent forgets the earlier exchange, and the next message is answered without the earlier context. The messages themselves remain in the chat.
    A Telegram user can make the agent forget sooner by sending /clear; Slack and Discord users cannot.
  • In a chat widget, the conversation belongs to the embed link that opened the widget, and lasts as long as the link does: everyone who opens the widget through the same link shares one conversation, and the conversation ends when the link expires, reaches its usage cap, or is revoked.

• Messages sent faster than the bot answers may go unanswered.
  On Telegram, Slack, and Discord, a message a user sends while the bot is still answering waits in a queue that Quill keeps for this user. When the queue is full, further messages are not taken, and the bot sends one notice asking the user to send the message again after the bot has replied.
  A Telegram bot answers the queued messages together, as a single question; a Slack or Discord bot answers them one by one.

• The bots answer text-only messages.
  On Telegram, a photo, a document, a sticker, or a voice message gets no reply. On Slack and Discord, a message that carries a file gets the reply "I can only read text messages right now."

• Pausing a channel takes it out of service; deleting a channel removes it.
  Both actions are described in the Channels view article, in Pausing and resuming a channel and Deleting a channel. The conversations a deleted channel carried remain available in the app's Conversations view.
  What each action means for the channel's users, and for a bot on its platform, depends on the channel type and is described in the type's article.

• The messages a channel sends on its own have a default text set by Quill.
  The notices a chat widget shows when its embed link no longer works, and the replies a Slack or Discord bot sends on its own, like "I can only read text messages right now.", cannot be changed. A Telegram bot's own messages can be replaced with texts of yours in the Bot messages tab of the channel's details view.

Troubleshooting

The symptoms below may be met by a channel's users, each with its likely cause and what to do about it.
The bots' messages are quoted in their default form; a Telegram bot with customized messages shows your texts instead.

In a chat with a Telegram, Slack, or Discord bot

• The bot does not reply to a photo or a file, or replies "I can only read text messages right now."
  Likely cause: the bots answer text-only messages, as stated in Behavior and limitations common to all channels, and the user's message may carry a file, like an image or a document. A Telegram bot gives such a message no reply; a Slack or Discord bot answers with the quoted notice.
  What to do: advise the user to send the question as text.
  A chat widget takes text only, so its users do not meet this symptom.
• The bot replies "I'm still working through your earlier messages, so that one didn't make it. Please resend it once I've replied."
  Likely cause: the user may have sent more messages than the bot's queue can hold while an answer was still being composed, as stated in Behavior and limitations common to all channels.
  What to do: advise the user to wait for the bot's reply, and then send the message again.
  A chat widget takes no new message while the agent is still answering, so its users do not meet this symptom.

In a channel of any type

• The agent answers from outdated information.
  Likely cause: one of the following may have happened.
  • The app's internal database may not yet hold the latest changes from the source database.
    What to do: check the state of the mirroring in the app's Data source view, which shows the number of recent writes and reports any errors met while syncing.
  • The conversation may hold earlier replies carrying data the agent had retrieved, that the agent now reads instead of retrieving the data again.
    What to do: a message that asks pointedly for the current data may make the agent retrieve it again.
    In any case, the agent retrieves the data again once it forgets the earlier exchange, as described in Behavior and limitations common to all channels.

Symptoms specific to a channel type, including those seen in Quill's management dashboard and on the bot's platform, are listed in the Troubleshooting section of the type's article: Telegram bot, Slack bot, and Discord bot.
The notices a chat widget shows when its embed link cannot be used are listed in Embed the Chat Widget.