Glossary

Definitions of key terms used throughout the botts.ai platform. A reference guide for understanding agents, knowledge bases, deployments, credits, roles, and other concepts.

A reference of key terms used throughout the botts.ai platform and this documentation.

A

Agent

An AI assistant you configure on the Agents page. An agent combines a System Prompt, linked Knowledge Bases, built-in and custom Tools, Conversation History, and Customer Memory. Each agent page has five tabs: Configure, Deploy, Contacts, Forms, and Usage. An agent goes live through one or more Deployments. The number of agents in your organization is limited by your Plan. See Agents.

Auto-Recharge

An optional billing setting that tops up your Credits automatically. You pick a Credit Package; whenever your balance falls below 10% of your monthly plan credit allowance, that package is charged to your saved payment method (the check runs every few minutes). After three consecutive failed charges, auto-recharge is disabled and stays off until you explicitly re-enable it in the billing settings (re-enabling resets the failure counter) — updating the payment method alone does not turn it back on. Low-balance warning emails are only sent when auto-recharge is not enabled. See Team & Billing.

B

Backup Model

An optional second AI model on a Website or Internal Chat deployment. It serves traffic only when the primary model fails (see Failover). The backup must be a text model and must differ from the primary; picking a backup from the same provider is allowed but the form shows a reliability warning — a different provider is recommended. The backup is validated against your Data Residency Tier because it handles real traffic during an outage. Phone deployments do not support backup models. See Deployments.

C

Channel

The way a Deployment reaches its users. Currently selectable channels are Website (chat Widget), Phone (voice calls on a real phone number), and Chat (Internal) (Internal Chat for your team). Telegram, WhatsApp, and Email appear in the channel selector but are not yet available ("Coming Soon").

Chunk

A segment of text from a document, sized for optimal retrieval. When a document is processed, it is broken into chunks that are individually indexed. This allows the search system to find the most relevant section of a document, not just the most relevant document.

Contact (End User)

A person who interacts with your agent through a deployment — a website visitor chatting in the widget or a caller on your phone line. Contacts are tracked in the agent's Contacts tab, where you can see each person's conversations and any facts the agent has remembered about them (see Memory). Contacts are not team members of your organization. See People & Memory.

Conversation

A single interaction session between a Contact and an Agent. A conversation contains all messages exchanged during one chat session or phone call. Conversations are listed in the agent's Contacts tab.

Conversation History

An agent feature (toggle in Configure) that lets the agent see recent messages from previous conversations with the same Contact on the same channel. Contact identities are per channel — a website visitor, a phone caller, and an internal chat user are separate contacts even if they are the same human — so history does not carry over between channels. You can set how many past messages are included. Unlike Memory, which stores distilled learnings, Conversation History passes raw recent messages to the agent.

Crawl

The automated process of visiting web pages, extracting their text content, and indexing it in a Knowledge Base. Crawls follow links from the start URL and can be run manually or on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule. Crawling costs 1 credit per page crawled. See Knowledge Base.

Credit Package

A fixed bundle of Credits you can buy on top of your monthly plan credits, priced in CHF, EUR, and USD and paid as a one-time charge. Purchased credits expire 12 months after purchase. Credit packages are also what Auto-Recharge charges automatically.

Credits

The usage currency of botts.ai. Credits are consumed by:

Each plan includes a monthly credit allowance that resets every billing cycle; unused plan credits expire at the end of the cycle. Purchased credits (see Credit Package) last 12 months; plan credits are always spent first. When your balance reaches zero, crawls and file uploads are blocked and phone calls are rejected with a spoken message.

D

Data Residency Tier

An organization-wide setting (labelled Server Location on the My Organization page) that restricts which AI models your organization can use, based on where data is processed and which company runs the servers:

Switzerland and the EU both count as "European." Model pickers only list compliant models, and saving a non-compliant model is rejected. If you tighten the tier, existing deployments on now non-compliant models keep running but are flagged with a warning badge on their agent. Knowledge-base storage and platform infrastructure are hosted in Switzerland for every organization, regardless of tier. See Deployments.

Deployment

A live instance of an Agent connected to a specific Channel, managed in the agent's Deploy tab. Each deployment has its own AI Model, optional Backup Model, channel-specific settings, and a unique API key. An agent can have multiple deployments — for example, one on your website and another on your phone line — and all of them share the same agent configuration and knowledge bases. Your plan limits how many active deployments you can have; deactivating a deployment with its toggle frees up headroom. See Deployments.

E

Embedding

A mathematical representation of text (a vector) that captures its semantic meaning. Embeddings enable semantic search — finding content by meaning rather than exact keyword matches. botts.ai generates embeddings on Swiss infrastructure.

End User

See Contact (End User).

F

Failover

The automatic switch from a deployment's primary model to its Backup Model when the primary fails. Failover triggers on provider server errors (5xx), rate limits (429), connection timeouts and network errors, and the case where the provider reports the model itself as invalid or decommissioned. It does not trigger on other client errors, after the agent has already started streaming a reply, or after a side-effecting tool (such as a form submission or HTTP POST) has already run in that turn. Failover applies to text channels only.

Form / Lead Capture

A built-in agent tool (toggle in the Configure tab) that lets the agent collect structured data from users — contact details, support tickets, booking requests. You define one or more forms with named fields; during a conversation the agent gathers the values naturally and submits the form. Submissions appear in the agent's Forms tab, and you can optionally receive an email notification at your organization's notification email address for each submission.

H

Hybrid Search

A search method that combines semantic search (meaning-based) and full-text search (keyword-based) to deliver comprehensive results. This is the default search mode used by agents and by the knowledge-base test search.

I

Integration

A connection that extends what your agents can do, managed on the Integrations page (Build section of the sidebar) with two tabs: Tools (custom HTTP tools shared by all agents in your organization) and Secrets (encrypted credentials those tools reference). See Integrations.

Internal Chat

The Chat (Internal) channel: a deployment that makes an agent available to your own team members inside the dashboard, via Chat in the sidebar. Each agent can have at most one Internal Chat deployment. Access can be limited to the whole organization, to a minimum Role, or to an invite list. Options include a welcome message, a chat logo, and a "Show Tool Use" toggle that controls whether users see which tools the agent is using.

K

Knowledge Base

A collection of information that an Agent uses to answer questions, managed under Knowledge in the sidebar. Knowledge bases are built by adding Sources — crawled websites or uploaded files. Content is extracted, chunked, embedded, and indexed for retrieval. One agent can link multiple knowledge bases, and one knowledge base can be shared by multiple agents. All knowledge-base data is stored in Switzerland. See Knowledge Base.

M

Memory

The Customer Memory feature (toggle in the agent's Configure tab, off by default). After each conversation, the agent extracts learnings about the person — preferred name, communication style, standing instructions — and applies them automatically in future conversations. Memory is stored per person and per agent. A retention setting controls how long learnings are kept — Keep indefinitely (default), or 30, 60, 90, 180 days, or 1 year. You can review and delete remembered facts under the agent's Contacts → People view. See People & Memory.

Model

An AI language model that powers a deployment. Every deployment selects a primary model; Website and Internal Chat deployments may add a Backup Model. The model picker shows each model's provider, hosting location, speed and intelligence ratings, and credit rates (billing is measured per token; rates are shown per ~1,000 words as an approximation). Phone deployments require a voice model; all other channels use text models. Which models are available depends on your Data Residency Tier.

O

Organization

A shared workspace on botts.ai where team members collaborate. Organizations contain agents, knowledge bases, integrations, and team members with Roles. The Plan, credit balance, and Data Residency Tier are all organization-level. All resources are scoped to an organization.

P

Page

The unit used for knowledge-base size limits: one page = 2,000 characters of stored extracted text. A document's page count is its character count divided by 2,000, rounded up. The page limit covers crawled and uploaded content combined, across all knowledge bases in your organization.

Plan

Your organization's subscription tier, which sets the monthly credit allowance and resource limits:

See Team & Billing.

R

Role

The permission level of a team member within an organization. The hierarchy is Member < Builder < Admin < Owner; each role includes everything below it.

Roles also drive role-based deployment access: a deployment can require a minimum role (e.g. Builder or Admin) to use it.

S

Secret

An encrypted credential (API key, token, password) stored on the Integrations → Secrets tab. Secrets are referenced in tool endpoints, headers, and auth fields with the syntax $secret:key, resolved at call time. Values are encrypted at rest and never returned by the API; to rotate a secret, delete and recreate it. Secrets are organization-scoped by default, with an optional personal scope — use organization scope for anything an agent calls in production. See Integrations.

Semantic Search

A search method that finds content based on the meaning of a query, not the exact words used. For example, a search for "opening hours" would also find content that says "business hours" or "when we are open."

Source

An origin of content in a Knowledge Base. A source is either a website (a URL that gets crawled, with per-source crawl settings and an optional schedule) or a file (an uploaded .pdf, .doc, .docx, .txt, or .md document, up to 100 MB per file). Each source contributes documents and chunks to the knowledge base; deleting a source deletes all of its indexed content. See Knowledge Base.

System Prompt

The instructions that define an Agent's personality, behavior, and rules, edited in the agent's Configure tab. The system prompt tells the AI model who it is, how to communicate, what topics to handle, and what boundaries to respect.

T

Three I's

The framework that describes the three pillars of every AI agent on botts.ai: Information (Knowledge Base), Intelligence (Agent configuration and reasoning), and Interaction (Deployments and channels).

Tool

A capability that an Agent can invoke during a conversation. Built-in tools include knowledge search (enabled automatically when knowledge bases are linked), Knowledge Browse (lets the agent list and read full documents), and Form / Lead Capture. Custom HTTP tools, created on the Integrations page, let the agent call external APIs — for example to check stock or look up an order. The agent decides when to use a tool based on the conversation and the tool's description. See Integrations.

V

Vector Search

See Semantic Search. Internally, semantic search is powered by vector similarity — comparing the mathematical embeddings of the query and the stored content to find the closest matches.

W

Widget

The chat window that a Website deployment embeds on your site via a one-line script tag containing the deployment's API key; it works on any website. Appearance and behavior — colors, fonts, welcome message, suggested messages, teaser bubble, position, size, and more — are customized after creation in an editor with a live preview, and applied with an explicit Save Changes. Regenerating the deployment's API key invalidates existing embed snippets. See Deployments.

Last updated on June 16, 2026