Proactive Bots
At a glance
| Location | Sidebar → Proactive Bots (Rocket icon) |
| Plan | All plans, including the free tier |
| Related features | 4 |
AI-powered outbound bot builder for creating automated proactive campaigns. Build bot templates with different modes:
- Text — Text-only conversations.
- Voice — Voice-only interactions.
- Hybrid — Combined text and voice.
Conversation modes: Simple (linear), AI-Guided (AI steers the conversation), or Scripted (follow a fixed flow). Each template has a visual flow builder with nodes and edges, system prompt, goal prompt, voice selection, language, max turns, and turn timeout. Templates can be duplicated to start a new one from an existing flow.
The panel has 3 tabs: Bots (template management), Campaigns (launch and track outbound campaigns), and Trigger Rules (automated triggers that start bot conversations based on conditions).
The Trigger Rules tab offers exactly four trigger types, all of them live: Label Applied (fires when a label is added to a contact, or any label if left blank), New Contact (fires a set delay after a contact is created), Chat Silent (fires once nobody has written in the conversation for a set time - a message in either direction resets the clock), and No Message From You (fires when you have not sent that contact anything for a set number of days, 14 by default, up to 90; their incoming replies do not reset it, and contacts you last wrote to over 90 days ago are left alone). Trigger rules are checked about every 5 minutes.
Label Applied fires only on a label put on the contact. Labelling a chat in the inbox does not fire it - chat labels and contact labels are stored separately and this rule reads contact labels only. The create-rule form states this.
Label Applied and New Contact fire only on events from the moment the rule is created onward, and they look back at most 7 days - a label applied 8 days ago never fires a rule, even one created before it. The create-rule form has an Include contacts from the last 7 days checkbox, off by default, which opts a new rule in to everything that already matched inside that window; combined with Auto-send that can queue up to 100 historical contacts within minutes, so the form warns about the pairing.
Keyword Match, Regex Pattern, AI Intent Detection, Outside Business Hours, Smart Link Click and Campaign Recipient are no longer offered here. They react to an incoming message rather than to a stored state, so they belong to Settings > Auto Replies, whose rules already detect all six and can start any of these same bots through the action Launch Proactive Bot. The Auto Replies trigger dropdown lists all six under exactly these names, so the rule is rebuilt by picking the same-named trigger there. A trigger rule of one of those six types created before the change is still listed, marked "will not fire", with the Auto Replies equivalent named on the card.
Each rule has a launch mode: Approval Required (default — matched contacts appear in a Pending Approvals queue at the top of the Trigger Rules tab, where each message can be approved and sent or cancelled) or Auto-send (sends without review). Safety controls per rule: cooldown days, max sends per contact, and an optional daily cap. Contacts with the DONOTSEND label are never messaged, and replying with a stop phrase opts the contact out automatically.
Categories include: sales, support, onboarding, feedback, and reactivation.
How to use
- Open Proactive Bots from the sidebar.
- Create a new bot template: choose channel mode (text/voice/hybrid), conversation mode, and configure the flow, or duplicate an existing template to start from a copy.
- Set system prompt, goal, language, and voice.
- Launch a campaign from the Campaigns tab to send the bot to selected contacts.
- Set up Trigger Rules to automatically start bot conversations when conditions are met.
- If a rule is set to Approval Required, approve or cancel each queued message in the Pending Approvals section of the Trigger Rules tab.
- To start a bot from something the contact does - a keyword, a regex, an AI intent, a message outside business hours, a Smart Link click or a campaign reply - go to Settings, then Auto Replies, create the rule there and choose the action Launch Proactive Bot.
Related features
FAQ
- What are proactive bots?
- How do I create an outbound bot?
- How do I duplicate a bot template?
- How do I launch a bot campaign?
- What is the difference between text and voice bots?
- How do trigger rules work?
- Why does my label rule not fire when I label a chat?
- How do I start a bot when someone sends a keyword?
- Can a bot chase contacts I have not messaged in a while?