Channels
Channels is the workspace-level place to decide where your agents answer and what each experience feels like. Open it from the main sidebar. The three channels — Chat widget, Embedded chat bar and Hosted page — are listed in the column beside the page (on a phone, as tabs under the page title), and each has its own address (for example /app?view=channels&panel=inline).
All channels is the first page in that column. It lists every place your agents answer — On your site, On hiy and In Slack — with the agent, where each was last seen and a Style link to the editor. Live means the agent is published and answering; Seen comes from real conversations, so a place with none in the last 30 days says Not seen in 30 days. Your site counts the chat widget, the chat bar and embeds together: they share one address. Email, Phone and WhatsApp wait under Coming soon, each with Tell me when it’s live.
The first live channels are:
- Chat widget — a floating chat experience on your site.
- Embedded chat bar — a compact agent input fixed at the bottom of your site.
- Hosted page — the existing hiy.ai page for a personal twin.
The hosted page is not a second editor: open it from Channels when a personal twin is available. Publishing its template sets the greeting and starting points on the agent’s hiy.ai page — the same template the preview shows. Until you publish one, that page keeps the greeting and questions from the agent’s own first impression, which is also what an agent with no hosted-page template shows. Product API, colleague access, and other destinations can be added later without making the first setup screen harder to understand.
Templates and agents
Each channel has a workspace default. It is the fallback used by agents that do not have a channel-specific choice. Templates are reusable: choose an existing one for an agent, or create a private copy with Customize for this agent.
You can also open Channels from an agent’s Overview. That keeps the agent selected, so changing its channel template takes one step. Resetting an agent returns it to the workspace default.
Greeting and starting points
Under Welcome, a template carries a greeting and three starting points — the tiles a visitor can tap before typing. A new template ships with placeholder starting points (“What do you do?”, “Show me the basics”…), and as long as you leave them exactly as they are, visitors see the agent’s own suggested questions instead — the ones drafted from its sources and checked against them. Edit a single word and the template’s own list is what shows. The same goes for the greeting: while the template’s greeting is the one hiy ships with, the agent’s own greeting shows instead. The embed shows three starting points.
Suggest from … sources drafts questions from the previewed agent’s material, using the same drafting as Settings → Rules → First impression: each proposal is a question the agent can actually answer. They appear under the button; tap one to drop it into the next free starting point (a slot still holding a placeholder counts as free), or Use the first three to fill all three at once. Edit them freely, then save or publish. Nothing is written until you save.
If nothing comes back, the note under the button says why: the agent has no sources yet; its sources have not been summarised yet (open Knowledge and press Train, then try again); or nothing in them can be answered confidently enough to offer a visitor.
Widget position and corner
The Chat widget has two settings of its own under Appearance: Position puts its launcher and panel in the page’s bottom-right or bottom-left corner, and Corner rounds the panel Soft, Round or Sharp. The launcher itself is hiy’s ink circle carrying the mark, breathing gently; the agent’s portrait is in the panel’s header, where a visitor reads it.
Open, the widget shows the same welcome the bar does — your greeting as a headline with the starting points as tiles — and the conversation replaces it on the first message, with the greeting as the agent’s first bubble.
Opens on, Home and Messages
On the new widget look, Opens on in the bubble’s Appearance picks the first screen: Conversation (the default) opens straight onto the chat, and Home opens a start screen. Either way the chat header’s back arrow reaches Home, and Home and Messages tabs sit under it. The chat bar and the inline block have no tabs.
Home has a soft header in your accent colour, an Ask box, the visitor’s two most recent conversations, and your starting points as Popular questions. Under the Ask box one line says it is AI (“AI support · may make mistakes · Answers right away”), and its info glyph opens About this chat.
A reply-time line, “The team usually replies within 3 hours”, appears on a Support Agent that offers a person, and only once at least five of its follow-ups have been replied to; it is the median of the real times. Outside working hours, when you have set them, it reads “The team is back Monday at 9:00” instead. With too few replies there is no line, never a typed default.
Messages lists this visitor’s conversations, newest first, with a Handed over chip on any that went to your team. They are kept on the visitor’s own device only (up to 20 conversations). This list lives only on the visitor’s device; the chat itself is handled like any other chat (see Privacy). Clear wipes them after a confirmation. A browser that blocks storage in a framed page shows “This browser does not keep conversations” and no Recent list. An unread marker is not part of this release.
Team faces and reply time
In the bubble’s Welcome section, Team faces lists the members of your workspace; tick up to three and Home shows them under the logo. Nobody is shown by default, only members of this workspace can be picked, and a visitor sees an initial with the name on hover, never a photo. Show reply time (on by default) switches the “usually replies within” line off; it still needs at least five replies before it shows. Both are on the new widget look only.
Help in the widget
When an agent has learned at least one web page, a Help tab joins Home and Messages, and Home gets a Search help row. The tab lists the agent’s three most recent pages under the label Pages. Typing two or more letters searches the titles and text of those pages as the visitor types (after a short pause) and shows up to eight, each with its address and the passage that matched. Pressing one opens an excerpt of up to 240 characters with Open the page (a new tab) and Ask about this, which opens a new conversation with the words “About” and the page title in the composer, ready to finish and send.
It is a plain text match, not a model call, so it costs nothing and answers instantly. It only covers web pages: uploaded files, typed notes, corrections and anything marked confidential or held back are never shown. With no match it says “Nothing found. Ask instead.” and offers the conversation. An agent with no web pages has no Help tab, and a restricted agent only searches for a visitor holding a valid token.
The public page (hiy.ai/<your-slug>) has the same Help search under
“Popular questions” on the new widget look, with the same rules. There,
Ask about this puts the words in the page’s Ask box instead. It shows only on a page anyone can open.
Bar behaviour and position
The Embedded chat bar has two settings of its own, under Appearance.
Behaviour decides how the bar rests on your site. Always visible keeps
the composer on screen on every page, so a visitor can ask without looking for
anything first. hiy’s pill rests as a small pill carrying hiy’s mark and
your agent’s name, and unfolds the composer when someone taps it — the quieter choice on
a page where the bar would otherwise take a fixed share of a phone screen.
Your button shows nothing at all until something on your page
opens it: give any element the attribute data-hiy-open (a “Talk to us”
button in your hero, a link in your nav), or call window.hiy.open() from
your own script. The composer springs up from the foot of the page and takes
focus; ✕ folds it away again and hands focus back to your button. The
preview stands in for your page with a “Chat with …” button of its own —
hiy’s mark, breathing — so you can try the bar before it is installed
anywhere.
Position pins the bar Left, Centre or Right across the foot of the page. A folded bar unfolds from wherever it is pinned.
All are per-template, so one agent can use an always-visible bar while another uses a button. Existing templates keep working unchanged — anything saved before these settings existed reads as Always visible and Centre until you change it. They do not apply to the Chat widget, which has its own corner.
Look
Under Look, the chat bar and the chat widget each get the same controls your twin page has, tuned separately per channel (the bar’s card and the widget’s panel are skinned by the same component, so a pick reads the same on both):
- Material — Solid (an opaque card that reads on any page), Frost (blurred glass), Clear (a light tint) or Plate (a deep ink plate, the same in both themes). Frost and Clear are glass: they need a background or an art behind them, so they wait until you pick one. For a workspace on the new widget look, Solid is called Light, and the chat bar also offers Dark glass (frosted dark, reads on busy pages).
- Accent and At rest (new widget look only) — Ink is the first accent swatch and the default when no colour was picked; a picked colour reaches Send, links and the focus ring only. For the bar, At rest is Compact (a small pill that widens when used) or Full width.
- Background — none, or one of the five gradients (Dusk, Ember, Moss, Sand, Slate), painted on the card itself. The page around the card is not touched.
- Art — none, or Strands, Dither or ASCII: slow-moving art behind the card, the composer and its buttons, seen through Frost or Clear. Picking an art on a Solid or Plate card switches it to Frost for you; it pauses when the tab is hidden and holds still for visitors who prefer reduced motion.
- Text — Serif, Sans or Mono, and Regular, Small or Large.
- Portrait and width — the avatar in the card’s identity line as a circle, rounded or square, and the bar’s column — or the widget’s panel — Narrow, Regular or Wide.
- Greeting — the welcome headline in a gradient made from your accent colour.
The preview beside the controls shows every pick as you make it; Publish makes it live, and a bar or widget on a customer’s site picks it up on the next page load.
What a visitor sees on the bar
At rest the bar is the composer alone: a borderless input with Send, and the small Report · Processed by hiy.ai · Privacy line beneath it, with the “Powered by hiy” credit at its head while your plan carries it. The greeting and starting points from this template are not on it yet. The first keystroke opens a card above the composer — the composer itself never moves: the identity line (the avatar, the agent’s name, and a small “AI support” or “AI twin” with an (i) for the fuller note), your greeting as a headline with the starting points beneath it. Sending replaces that welcome with the conversation in the same card: the visitor’s questions on the right in your accent colour, the agent’s answers on the left, and a few follow-up questions to tap after each answer.
The ✕ in the card’s identity line folds the card away and leaves the composer — or, on a hiy’s pill or Your button bar, folds the whole bar back to its resting state — and Escape does the same. On those two, a composer that has been opened but not typed into carries its own ✕ beside Send, so it can be put away again without a card. The conversation itself is kept: typing again brings it back, and it survives a page refresh in that tab.
Typed starters on the bar
On the new widget look the resting bar carries a small AI chip beside the agent’s mark, and types your starting points into the field, one at a time, with a blinking caret. In Chat, the switch Type starters in the bar turns it off (it is on by default) and a checkbox per starter picks which ones are typed, up to three, in order.
It starts a moment after the bar is on screen and the tab is visible, runs at most twice and 30 seconds in all, then rests on your Message placeholder. A starter wider than the bar is skipped, and if none fit, none are typed. It stops the moment a visitor focuses the bar, presses it, types, or opens the chat, and it never runs for a visitor whose device asks for reduced motion. A screen reader hears your placeholder, not the typing.
When a visitor has a conversation saved in the tab and has folded the card away, the resting bar reads Continue your chat, and pressing it opens the transcript again.
Under Message placeholder, a read-only Powered by hiy row says whether the line is on your plan (“On your plan. Founding removes it.”) and links to how the line works.
Edit, preview, publish
The preview updates as you edit. On the new widget look a Widget · Bar switch above the preview shows this template, or your saved template for the other one; changing the corner, Opens on, a team face or the typewriter moves the preview to the part it affects, and a typewriter change plays the bar again. On a phone a 220px strip of the preview stays at the top of the Edit tab. Save draft keeps changes private; Publish saves and publishes the displayed configuration together. New visitor embed sessions read the published version, never an unsaved draft. Existing open visitor conversations are not reloaded.
Use Preview as to try another agent without changing the template being edited; it sits under the template line in the settings column with the desktop and phone controls, Restart conversation and the full-page preview button (on a phone, above the preview). The preview takes the wider column and shows the desktop frame at full width. Install and Publish sit at the right of the page title. Once you change something, a bar at the foot of the editor names what changed, with Save draft and Discard. The preview shows your widget with the chrome a visitor gets — the chat widget’s launcher and card, or the chat bar’s card — drawn by the same component as the full-page preview and the docked preview beside every agent page, so what you edit here is what they meet.
Open full preview in new tab gives the same widget a whole page, with backdrop, theme and device controls, your current appearance edits and a separate test conversation. Your original conversation stays open. The appearance snapshot lasts 30 minutes in this browser; it does not publish changes or synchronise later edits. Restart conversation starts a new test. On a phone, Edit and Preview sit at the foot of the screen, under your thumb, with Save draft above them once there is something to save; switching never loses changes. Drafts survive channel and template switches until you leave the editor; save before leaving.
The Template row, the last row of the settings card, holds what the previewed agent uses — an existing published template or the workspace default — and the controls for the template being edited: customise it for that agent (a copy, assigned to them), duplicate, rename, and set as workspace default. The row also says how many agents use the template you are changing; publish a copy when it is ready.
Install opens a selectable code snippet and instructions. Restricted support agents require a visitor token minted on your server; never put the signing secret in website code. Installing uses the agent’s assigned published template, not whichever draft you happen to be previewing.
Channels preview tests visitor presentation safely. Use the agent’s Sandbox to investigate answer quality and source behaviour.
If an agent has its own template, edits to that copy affect only its users. Editing a shared template affects every agent using it when you publish; selecting a preview agent never changes this scope.
The channel editor is the home for channel-specific installation and preview actions. Slack is a live channel too, connected and configured separately from Connections rather than from this editor — there’s no template or appearance to set, since Slack’s own UI is where a visitor reads the message. WhatsApp is not live yet; the public Channels overview explains what is available today.