Glossary
Every term in these docs, defined in a few sentences, with a link to the page that covers it properly.
Every term you will hit in this documentation, alphabetised, with a link to the page that covers it in full. If a word here is doing more work than you expected, follow the link — most of these are small ideas with a sharp edge somewhere.
24-hour window #
WhatsApp's rule, not ours: you may send free-form messages to a customer only within 24 hours of their last message to you. Outside that window, only pre-approved templates go out, and a free-form attempt is refused with a 409 and session_window_closed. The clock resets every time the customer messages you again. No template is sent automatically when a window closes — if something needed to go out, it does not go out later. → The 24-hour window
Agent #
The thing your customer talks to: a persona, the knowledge bases attached to it, and the tools it may call, bundled together. An agent is channel-neutral — you write it once and each channel renders it appropriately, so the same answer arrives as light markdown in the web widget, as WhatsApp's own formatting on WhatsApp, and as spoken prose on a call. Customers reach an agent once it has been published at least once and deployed to a channel; after that, every change you save reaches them from their next message. → Agents
API key #
The credential your backend uses to call the public API, formatted amk_live_…. It belongs to a whole workspace, carries the scopes chosen when it was created, is sent as Authorization: Bearer … or X-Api-Key, and is only ever stored as a hash — the plaintext is shown once, at creation. Owners and admins create, roll and revoke keys on Developers. Because it is workspace-wide, a key in front-end JavaScript is a leaked workspace; the API is server-side only and sends no CORS headers. → Authentication
Call mode #
A phone number's setting for what a caller may speak, labelled Call language in the console. Three values: English only (en), Hindi + English (multi, for callers who switch mid-sentence), and All Indian languages (indic, following the caller across Hindi, English and nine other Indian languages). It also limits which languages the call may open in — you cannot greet in Tamil on a number set to English only. → Languages
Campaign #
A send to many people at once, run from Campaigns on the Growth plan and above: a WhatsApp broadcast of an approved template, or a call batch in which an agent calls each person with your script. Campaigns run inside a sending window in your workspace's time zone, respect opt-outs and frequency caps, and report each recipient's result. → Campaigns
Channel #
A kind of touchpoint where customers reach you: web chat, WhatsApp, or voice. Distinct from a channel connection, which is a specific one you own and have verified — this website's domain, that WhatsApp Business number, this phone number. Connections are created and verified in the console; the API does not create them. → How it fits together
Chunk #
A passage of your content, indexed on its own. Ingested sources are split into chunks of about 1,600 characters, cut at headings and sentence boundaries, each repeating the last 200 characters of the one before so a fact straddling a boundary is not lost. Retrieval works at this granularity: the agent is given chunks, never whole documents. The console reports knowledge in chunks, which is a useful proxy for how much an agent actually knows. → How retrieval works
Contact #
A person in your customer directory, holding a name, phone, email, WhatsApp identifier, tags, and per-channel consent. Contacts are matched on email, phone, and WhatsApp ID, and an existing contact is enriched only in its empty fields — a supplied value never overwrites one that is already there. There is no merge: conflicting identities stop the operation for a human to resolve. → Conversations and contacts
Conversation #
One continuous exchange between a customer and an agent on one channel, with a full transcript. Conversations are per channel by design, so the same person messaging you on WhatsApp and chatting on your website has two conversations linked by one contact. The public transcript contains only user and model messages; the internal record of what the agent looked up or called is kept separately and shown only in the console inbox. → Conversations and contacts
Credits #
A prepaid balance in your workspace's currency that pays for usage beyond your plan's monthly allowance on Starter and Growth, such as extra voice minutes or conversations. When both the allowance and the credits run out, new conversations and calls on that meter are refused until you top up. → Credits
Deployment #
An agent on one channel connection — a website widget, a WhatsApp number or a phone number — with that channel's own settings, such as allowed domains or the opening line callers hear. Each touchpoint is answered by one agent at a time; one agent can have many deployments. A deployment always serves the agent's saved settings, so you don't redeploy after editing an agent. A new or changed deployment is checked before it goes live, and the old one keeps serving if the check fails. You can disable, enable and remove deployments on the agent's Deployments tab. → Deployments
DID #
Direct Inward Dialling number — the phone number customers actually dial, provisioned to your workspace. A DID is inert on its own: it rejects calls until an agent is explicitly deployed to it, and a workspace-wide voice setting will not substitute for that. It also serves as the caller ID for outbound calls, and the API will only place a call from a DID your workspace owns and has active. → Numbers and KYC
Human handoff #
Passing a live conversation from the agent to a person, on web chat, WhatsApp or a phone call, during the live hours you set. The request arrives in Live support with an AI-written summary; outside live hours, or if nobody accepts in time, the agent opens a ticket instead. → Human handoff
Idempotency key #
A value you send as the Idempotency-Key header on a request that spends money, so a retry cannot double-send. Replaying the same key with the same body returns the original stored response without touching the provider; replaying it with a different body is a 409 with idempotency_key_reuse. Keys are scoped to your workspace, the specific API key, and the endpoint, and they expire after 24 hours. → Idempotency
Knowledge base #
A container of sources that an agent answers from. Creating one does not make any agent smarter — an agent only uses knowledge bases attached to it, and the same knowledge base can teach several agents at once. Attaching, detaching or deleting a knowledge base takes effect on every connected agent immediately. → Knowledge bases
Opening language #
The language a phone call opens in, set per voice deployment as Greet callers in. It is not the same as the call mode: the mode decides what the caller may speak, the opening language decides only the first line. The agent follows the caller from their first reply regardless, so an opening language is a starting register, not a constraint on the conversation. → Languages
Organization ID #
Your workspace's identifier, shown on Settings → Organization. Quote it when you contact support, and add ?org=<Organization ID> to a console link to open it in that workspace. → Settings
Public reference #
The customer-safe identifier for a ticket, formatted AM- followed by eight uppercase hex characters — AM-4F91C2E0. It is what an agent reads back to a customer and what your team quotes in a reply, and it is derived from the ticket rather than being a sequential counter, so it reveals nothing about your volume. Every ticket has one, whether the agent created it or your backend did. → Tickets
Retrieval #
Finding the passages most relevant to a customer's question and putting them in front of the model before it answers. Two searches run together: one by meaning, which finds a passage that says the same thing in different words, and one by keyword, which finds exact model numbers, part codes and product names. Their results are merged, near-duplicates removed, and on chat the best are re-ranked; the agent receives up to 10 chunks. On calls, the agent also keeps a fact sheet built from your knowledge. No phrasing will find a passage that was never indexed. → How retrieval works
Role #
What a person may do in a workspace: owner, admin or member. Members do the day-to-day support work; admins also configure agents, knowledge, channels, campaigns and developer credentials; the one owner also controls the plan, payment and ownership transfer. A person can hold a different role in each workspace they belong to. → Workspaces & roles
Scope #
A capability granted to an API key, named the way you would describe it out loud rather than after an HTTP route. Eleven values are accepted: messages:send, calls:write, conversations:read, contacts:read, contacts:write, tickets:write, agents:read, campaigns:read, campaigns:write, appointments:read, and appointments:write. The appointment pair unlocks no public route. Scopes are chosen when the key is created and can't be changed afterwards; to change them, create a new key and revoke the old one. → Scopes
Sender #
The WhatsApp Business number that messages go out from, and that customers reply to. A workspace can have more than one, and an agent can be pinned to a specific sender or use the workspace default. The sender is also what the 24-hour window is tracked against, so a customer's window with one of your numbers says nothing about their window with another. → Set up WhatsApp
Source #
One item of content or connectivity inside a knowledge base. There are exactly five types: website (crawled), file (uploaded documents and images), text (pasted), endpoint (your HTTP API, either ingested on a schedule or called live), and mcp (an MCP server whose tools become abilities). Each source reports its own status and, where applicable, its own refresh schedule. → Knowledge bases
Template #
A WhatsApp message whose wording Meta has approved in advance, with placeholders for the values you fill in at send time. Templates are the only thing you can send outside the 24-hour window, which makes having at least one approved utility template the difference between reaching a customer and not. Categories that work end to end are UTILITY and MARKETING; an agent can only send templates you have explicitly added to its allowlist. → Templates
Ticket #
A unit of asynchronous support work, created by an agent when it cannot finish the job, by your team in the console, or by your backend over the API. It carries a status, a priority, an assignee, an SLA clock set at creation, the originating conversation, and a public reference. Tickets are the fallback outside live human handoff hours or when nobody is online. → Tickets
Tool #
Something the agent can do rather than know. Built-in tools include opening a support ticket, sending a WhatsApp message, searching knowledge, scheduling a call-back, booking appointments and ending a call, each switched on or off on the agent's Tools tab. Your own tools are endpoint or mcp sources on a knowledge base, each declaring whether it reads or acts. A disabled tool is not offered to the agent at all, so it cannot be attempted. → Tools and actions
Version #
A numbered, unchangeable record of an agent's whole setup at one moment: persona, per-channel personas, attached knowledge and tool settings. You create one with Publish. A version does not hold changes back — customers are always served the agent's saved settings — but it gives you a history to compare and a point to roll back to, on every channel at once. An agent must be published once before its first deployment. → Versions
Webhook #
An HTTPS endpoint of yours that we POST to when something happens, so your systems learn about events without polling. Twenty event types cover messages, conversations, calls and call outcomes, tickets, leads, campaigns, Duesly payments, and appointments. Every delivery is signed, and you must verify the signature against the raw request body — parsing the JSON and re-serialising it changes the bytes and the signature will not match. → Webhooks
Workspace #
Your organisation, and the isolation boundary for everything else. It owns the agents, the knowledge, the channel connections, the conversations, the contacts, the API keys, and the bill. Every query is filtered by workspace before anything else happens, and there is no mechanism — no sharing setting, no cross-workspace agent, no shared knowledge base — for data to cross it. → Workspaces and roles
Workspace time zone #
The clock your workspace runs on, chosen when the organization is created and changeable on Settings → Organization. Campaign sending windows, live hours, call-backs, Duesly and your agents' sense of today all follow it. → Settings