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AI Training is where you build chat assistants — text-based AI personas — and train them on your own content. A trained assistant becomes the brain of a chatbot widget on your site or a Soneka auto-reply flow. You’ll find it under More → AI Training. A chat assistant is two things bundled together:
  • A persona and model setup — greeting, character brief, tone, language, provider, model, reply length, creativity, fallback, and human-handoff rules.
  • A set of knowledge sources — web links, files, free text, and Q&A pairs the assistant answers from.
When a visitor chats, the assistant draws on your material to answer. Chat assistants are separate from the voice AI Call Assistant: chat assistants reply in text; voice assistants answer phone calls. Build a chat assistant with the five-step Smart Agent Builder: Identity → Persona → Brain → Safety → Knowledge.
Admin sets the provider keys once. You don’t paste an API key here. Your platform admin configures the OpenAI / Anthropic Claude / Google Gemini keys under Admin → AI & API Keys, and every chat assistant uses them automatically.
Plan-gated. AI Training needs the AI Chat Assistant plan feature — the same one the chatbot widget uses. Without it, a workspace can’t create assistants.

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Creating a chat assistant

1

Open the builder

From the AI Training list, click New assistant (or open an existing one to edit).
2

Work through the five steps

Fill in Identity, Persona, Brain, Safety, and Knowledge. Use Save draft at any point — the persona and model settings save together.
3

Add knowledge sources

In Step 5, add URLs, files, free text, or Q&A pairs. Each is checked immediately and lands in a ready (or failed) state.
4

Set status to Live

In Step 1, flip the roll-out status to Live so the assistant appears in the chatbot widget picker. Only Live assistants can be selected.
5

Attach it to a widget

Head to your chatbot widget settings and pick the assistant to put it to work.
A brand-new assistant starts with sensible defaults — a friendly greeting, a concise “helpful website assistant” brief, OpenAI gpt-4o-mini, 400-token replies, creativity 0.7, and handoff on. Change any of them before the first save.

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Step 1 · Identity

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Tone options

Tone shapes the assistant’s writing style on every reply, alongside its language.

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Step 2 · Persona & opening line

Safety lives in the brief. The character brief is the right place for guardrails — for example “never quote prices above $500 (escalate to a human instead)” or “politely refuse to discuss competitors.” Everything you write here is fed to the assistant word-for-word, so it shapes every reply.

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Step 3 · Model & reply controls

Choose the brain and tune how it answers.

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Model reference

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Step 4 · Fallback & human handoff

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Step 5 · Train the agent (knowledge)

Add the material the assistant answers from. Each source is processed on the spot and shown in a ready (or failed) state with a rough size estimate. There are four kinds of source: Sources can apply to one assistant or the whole workspace. Delete a source at any time — its uploaded file is removed with it. The source list shows kind, label, state, and size estimate per row.
File formats. Accepted types: TXT, Markdown (.md / .markdown), plain text, CSV, LOG, HTML (.html / .htm), PDF, and DOCX. PDF and DOCX have their text extracted automatically. Any other file type returns a clear error.
URL safety & limits. The URL reader only opens public web pages (http / https). It refuses anything else and blocks addresses that point to private, internal, or local networks — so a link you add can’t be used to reach internal systems. It waits up to 20 seconds and reads up to ~80,000 characters per page.

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Where the assistant is used

A ready chat assistant becomes the brain of a chatbot widget. When a visitor sends a message, the widget:
  1. Saves the visitor’s message to the conversation.
  2. If the widget runs an assistant, generates a reply, saves it, and shows it to the visitor.
  3. If anything goes wrong, shows the assistant’s fallback message instead of an error.
The reply is built from your character brief, tone, language, and handoff phrase, plus your knowledge sources. Every ready source that applies to this assistant or the whole workspace is included, in order, up to 12,000 characters total. Recent conversation history (about the last 20 turns) is also included so replies stay on topic.
Other channels. Today the chatbot widget is what uses chat assistants. The same persona and knowledge setup is designed to power other text-AI channels in future — for example, auto-replies to inbound WhatsApp messages.

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Managing assistants

  • Duplicate — copies the persona, model settings, and all training sources into a new paused “(copy)”. Useful for branching a persona (e.g. cloning a “Pricing concierge” into a Spanish variant).
  • Delete — removes the assistant from the list while keeping the underlying data.
  • The list shows totals — all assistants, active assistants, total knowledge entries, and how many are ready — plus each row’s provider, knowledge count, tone, and last-updated time, with name search.

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Cost cautions

Every source you add is given to the assistant on each reply, so more (and larger) sources mean more cost per reply, up to the 12,000-character limit.
  • Keep sources tight and relevant — a single good FAQ Q&A often covers more than a whole-site dump.
  • Lean on Q&A pairs for the answers that matter most — they’re compact and unambiguous.
  • Prefer a smaller model (e.g. gpt-4o-mini or gemini-2.5-flash-lite) with a sensible reply length for high-traffic widgets.
  • When using admin keys, replies count toward your workspace’s monthly AI usage limit; hitting it blocks further replies until you upgrade or switch to your own key.

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Troubleshooting