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Company

Everything in Shortext belongs to a company: agents, channels, conversations, API keys and webhooks. Your user account can be a member of several companies; each member has a role (for example admin, manager or agent) that decides what they can see and do in the dashboard.

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Agent

An agent answers your customers. It has:
  • a name and an active switch: an inactive agent keeps receiving and storing messages, but does not answer;
  • instructions: the system prompt the AI follows (tone, rules, what to do and not to do);
  • an AI switch: when the AI is off, the agent sends a fixed inactive message instead;
  • tools: your own HTTP APIs the agent can call to look up or change data, see Tools;
  • a knowledge base it can search to answer.
Your plan sets how many agents your company can have.

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Channel

A channel is where conversations happen. Shortext supports three types: Each channel is attached to one agent, which answers on it. A channel can also be detached: messages are still stored, nobody answers automatically.

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Contact

A contact is a customer. It is identified by its identifier on the channel: a phone number on WhatsApp, an email address on a mailbox, your own user id on a Shortext endpoint.

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Conversation and session

A conversation is the thread between one contact and one of your channels. Inside it, a session is the current period of activity:
  • active: a session is open, the agent (or a human) answers;
  • archived: no session is open; a new message opens a new session.

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Handover

When a person from your team takes a conversation over, it is in handover: the AI agent stops answering this contact until the conversation is handed back. Replying from the Inbox (or through the API) takes the conversation over by default. See Handover and assignment.

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Assignee and tickets

A session can be assigned to a member of your company, who then follows it in Inbox > Mine. A conversation can also produce tickets to track a request until it is solved. See Tickets.

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Identifiers in the API

The API never exposes internal database ids. Agents look like AGI-XXXXX, members like USR-XXXXX, companies like CMP-XXXXX, Shortext endpoints like ste_... and webhook events like evt_.... Treat every id as an opaque string.