Onboarding and preferences

What it is

A brand-new account has nothing in it, so instead of an empty dashboard you get a getting-started card that walks you through the four things that have to happen before a chatbot can talk to anyone:

1. Create a chatbot.
2. Add knowledge so it has something to answer from.
3. Wait for training to finish.
4. Share it — but only after you activate it.

Preferences are a separate thing that people often expect to find in the same place. Theme, language, timezone, and time format all live under Settings → Appearance, not in the welcome card.

When you would use it

• Day one, when you have just signed up and want the shortest path to a working chatbot.
• When the welcome card has vanished and you want to know why.
• When you have created a chatbot but visitors still cannot reach it.

Where to find it

The card appears on Dashboard (and the Chatbots list) while the workspace has no chatbots.

Preferences are at Dashboard → Settings → Appearance.

Steps

1. Sign in and open Dashboard. With no chatbots yet, the getting-started card is the main thing on the page.
2. Select Create to make your first chatbot. This is the only button on the card — the other three steps are guidance, not actions.
3. Open the new chatbot and go to Knowledge. Add something small and clean first: a page of pasted text is ideal. See Add text knowledge.
4. Wait until the row reads trained. Training runs in the background — see Dataset status and training.
5. Test it before anyone else does. Open Test Chatbot and ask a question whose answer is only in what you just added.
6. Activate the chatbot. Creating and training are not the same as activating, and an inactive chatbot's public link is a 404.
7. Share the hosted link, or embed the widget. See Share a hosted chatbot link.
8. Whenever you like, open Settings → Appearance to set your language, timezone, and theme.

The step people skip

Activation. It is worth calling out on its own because it produces the single most common "it is broken" report from new accounts.

A chatbot can be created, fully trained, and answering perfectly in Test Chatbot, and still return a 404 to the outside world — because it has not been activated. Test Chatbot is an owner tool and works regardless of activation state. The public surfaces do not.

Before you send the link to anyone, open it yourself in a private browsing window. That is the only check that reflects what a visitor actually gets. See Activate or pause a chatbot.

What you will see

The welcome card lists the four steps with the first one actionable. Once a chatbot exists, the card disappears and the Dashboard becomes the normal overview with metrics and lists. There is no way to bring the card back, and nothing is lost — everything it pointed at is in the sidebar.

Settings → Appearance is a separate tab in Settings. It has never been part of the welcome flow.

A sensible first hour

• Start small. One chatbot, one page of text. Prove the loop end to end before you upload a hundred documents. If something is wrong, one source is easy to diagnose.
• Do not crawl your whole website first. It is tempting and it is the slowest way to find out whether anything works. Crawl once you have seen a correct answer come back.
• Write knowledge in your customers' words. The chatbot matches questions to passages, so a heading phrased the way people actually ask beats an internal term every time.
• Check the readiness signals on the chatbot's Playground tab before sharing anything. See Chatbot readiness.
• Then set your preferences. Language and timezone make everything else easier to read, but they do not need to come first.

Limits and plan notes

• A new account starts on Free: 50 message credits, 1 chatbot, 400 KB of knowledge, and 1 seat (you).
• Free includes the hosted chatbot link. The website widget, plugins, and messaging channels need a paid plan. See Plans and what you get.
• Preferences cost nothing and do not consume credits.
• Preferences belong to you, not to the workspace: they follow you when you switch accounts, while chatbots, credits, and billing belong to whichever workspace you are in.

Common problems

The welcome card disappeared.

You have at least one chatbot now. That is the card's entire trigger. Use the Chatbots list and this Help Center from here.

I finished everything and visitors still get a 404.

The chatbot is not active. Create, train, and activate are three separate things.

I created a chatbot in the wrong workspace.

Chatbots do not move between workspaces. Delete it and create it again in the right one — check the workspace switcher first. See Switch accounts.

Training seems stuck on the first source.

Give it a minute. A small text source is quick; a large PDF or a crawl is not. Rows that genuinely strand are recovered automatically.

Where do I set the chatbot's language?

Not here. Your dashboard language is a personal preference; what the chatbot says to visitors is a per-chatbot setting. See Chatbot messages and language.

I used my 50 free credits testing.

Test Chatbot conversations count. Be a little sparing on Free, or upgrade — see How message credits work.