Skip to main content
AI Agents in Soneka let you put intelligent, context-aware automation at the front line of your WhatsApp conversations. Instead of rigid keyword rules or decision trees, an AI agent understands natural language, draws answers from your own documents and URLs, and hands off to a human agent the moment a situation requires it. Whether you’re handling hundreds of support queries a day or qualifying leads at midnight, an AI agent works around the clock without missing a message — and without exposing customer data to the underlying model.
Image

​
What an AI Agent Can Do

Answer Customer Questions

The agent searches your knowledge base to find accurate answers and responds in natural, conversational language — in the customer’s own language if needed.

Qualify and Capture Leads

Ask pre-defined qualifying questions, collect contact details, and push structured data to your CRM or a connected flow.

Handle Escalation

Detect when a customer is frustrated, asks a question the agent can’t answer, or explicitly requests a human — then seamlessly hand off to a live agent with full conversation context.

Voice Interaction

Via WA Calling, an AI agent can answer inbound calls, handle voicemail, and transcribe the conversation for your team to review.

​
Supported LLM Providers

Soneka connects to five AI providers. You can choose the model that best fits your use case, cost tolerance, and compliance requirements.

OpenAI

GPT-4o and GPT-4 Turbo. Best general-purpose reasoning and instruction-following.

Anthropic Claude

Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Haiku. Excellent for nuanced, long-context customer support conversations.

Google Gemini

Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash. Strong multilingual performance and fast response times.

Mistral

Mistral Large and Nemo. Open-weight models suited to on-premise or privacy-sensitive deployments.

ElevenLabs

Voice synthesis for AI Calling. Produces natural-sounding speech for outbound and voicemail scenarios.
The model you select applies per agent. You can run different agents with different providers — for example, Claude for support and Gemini for sales qualification.

​
Building a RAG Knowledge Base

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds your agent’s answers in your own content rather than relying solely on the model’s training data. This means fewer hallucinations and answers that actually reflect your products, policies, and processes.
Keep each source document focused on a single topic. Agents retrieve the most relevant chunks per query — shorter, well-structured documents yield more accurate answers than one large file containing everything.

​
Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)

On the Enterprise plan, you can connect your own API keys for any supported provider instead of using Soneka’s shared credentials. BYOK gives you direct cost visibility, the ability to use private model deployments (such as Azure OpenAI), and ensures that inference traffic is billed directly to your account. To configure BYOK, go to Settings → AI → API Keys, select a provider, and paste your key. Soneka validates the key against the provider’s API before saving.

​
PII Protection

Customer messages often contain names, phone numbers, email addresses, national IDs, and payment details. Soneka automatically redacts PII before the message reaches the AI model. The redaction layer runs on Soneka’s infrastructure and replaces detected sensitive tokens with neutral placeholders (e.g. [NAME], [EMAIL]). The original values are never logged or sent to the provider.
BYOK does not disable PII redaction. Redaction happens upstream of the model call regardless of which key is used. You can review the redaction rules applied to your workspace in Settings → AI → PII Rules.

​
Create an Agent

Soneka guides you through a 5-step wizard to build a smart agent. Open AI Training → New and follow each stage — you can Save draft at any point and return later; the wizard stays in Draft / unsaved until you complete step 5.
1

Identity

Give the agent a name, pick its language, and decide how it should sound.
Agent wizard step 1: Identity
Click Next to continue.
2

Persona & opening line

Define the agent’s voice and its very first message.
Agent wizard step 2: Persona & opening line
  • Opening line (required, visitor-facing) — the first bubble shown when a chat opens. Keep it short and warm, e.g. Hi! How can I help today?.
  • Character brief (system instructions) — internal prompt that shapes every reply. Never shown to visitors. Include:
    • Do’s and don’ts (topics to cover, topics to refuse)
    • Escalation rules (when to hand off to a human)
    • House style (formal / casual, emoji use, length)
A precise character brief is the single biggest lever on reply quality. Spell out edge cases explicitly — the model follows what you write, not what you meant.
3

Brain — model & reply controls

Choose the LLM and tune how it writes.
Agent wizard step 3: Model & reply controls
Cheaper models (Haiku, Flash-Lite, GPT-4o-mini) handle 80% of support traffic well. Reserve the flagship models for agents that need nuanced reasoning.
4

Safety — fallback & human handoff

Cover what happens when the model fails or the visitor needs a person.
Agent wizard step 4: Fallback & human handoff
  • Fallback reply — sent verbatim if the model returns nothing or the API call fails. Something reassuring like A teammate will follow up shortly — thanks for your patience. works well.
  • Enable handoff to a human — toggle on to let visitors escape the bot.
  • Trigger phrase — visitor types this anywhere in a message (e.g. talk to human) and the agent stops replying; the conversation lights up in your team inbox.
  • Handoff acknowledgement — the final message the agent sends before going silent (e.g. Sure — pulling in a teammate now.).
Leave handoff enabled unless you have a very specific reason to trap visitors with the bot. A frustrated customer with no exit is a churn risk.
5

Knowledge — train the agent

Ground the agent in your own content so it stops hallucinating.
Agent wizard step 5: Train the agent
Pick one of four source kinds and add as many entries as you need:For a Live URL entry: give it a Label (e.g. Pricing page), paste the URL, and click Fetch & train. The row appears in the knowledge table with its state (Ready, Fetching, Failed).Click Finish & close to save the agent. It’s now available to attach to widgets, auto-reply rules, and flows.

​
Attaching an Agent

1

Go to Auto-Reply

Navigate to Messaging → Auto-Reply and click New Rule.
2

Set the Trigger

Choose All incoming messages or a keyword trigger to scope when the agent activates.
3

Set the Action to AI Agent

Under Reply with, select AI Agent and choose the agent you configured.
4

Save and Activate

Toggle the rule on. The agent will now handle all matched inbound messages automatically.

​
Escalation to a Human Agent

You can configure escalation triggers on any AI agent. When triggered, Soneka pauses the AI, marks the conversation as Needs Human, and notifies the assigned team in the Inbox. Escalation can be triggered by:
  • A customer typing “agent”, “human”, or “speak to someone” (configurable keywords)
  • The agent reaching a maximum turn limit without resolving the query
  • The agent’s confidence score falling below your configured threshold
  • A specific intent detected in the conversation (e.g. billing dispute, complaint)
The human agent receives the full conversation history, including all AI turns, so they can pick up without asking the customer to repeat themselves.

​
AI Voicemail via WA Calling

When a customer calls your WhatsApp number and no agent is available, the AI voicemail agent answers the call using ElevenLabs voice synthesis. It greets the caller, explains that the team is unavailable, and invites them to leave a message or ask a question. The call is recorded, transcribed, and surfaced in the Calling inbox with an AI-generated summary. Your team can listen, read the transcript, and reply by chat or callback.
AI voicemail requires the Pro plan or above and must be enabled in Settings → Calling → Voicemail.

​
Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Once activated, an AI agent responds to incoming messages at any time of day without any manual intervention. You can optionally set business-hours rules so the agent acknowledges off-hours contacts differently.
Yes — that’s exactly what the knowledge base is for. Upload PDFs, DOCX files, or link URLs, and the agent uses RAG to retrieve relevant content when answering. The underlying model itself is not fine-tuned (that remains the provider’s model), but the agent is grounded entirely in your content.
AI Agents are available on the Growth plan and above. BYOK is an Enterprise feature. ElevenLabs voice is available on Pro and Enterprise.
You can review all AI conversations in the Inbox and flag incorrect responses. Flagged conversations are shown in AI → Feedback, where you can correct the answer and add it as a curated knowledge base entry to prevent the same error in future.
No. Soneka uses the providers’ API endpoints under data-processing agreements that prohibit using your data for model training. Additionally, PII is redacted before any data leaves Soneka’s infrastructure.
Yes. You can configure different agents with different providers and deploy them on different auto-reply rules or flow nodes. Only one provider is active per agent at any given time.