---
title: "Otto agent setup and a much faster dashboard"
canonical_url: "https://chatthing.ai/blog/otto-setup-and-a-faster-dashboard"
last_updated: "2026-11-04T15:31:15.222Z"
meta:
description: "Otto now builds new agents from your website, the Chat Thing dashboard is much faster, and website data sources read linked PDFs."
"og:description": "Otto now builds new agents from your website, the Chat Thing dashboard is much faster, and website data sources read linked PDFs."
"og:title": "Otto sets up your agent, and the dashboard is much faster - Blog - Chat Thing"
"twitter:description": "Otto now builds new agents from your website, the Chat Thing dashboard is much faster, and website data sources read linked PDFs."
"twitter:title": "Otto sets up your agent, and the dashboard is much faster - Blog - Chat Thing"
---
[← Back to blog](https://chatthing.ai/blog)**Changelog**# **Otto sets up your agent, and the dashboard is much faster**
~ 9 min read
---
---
### **On this page**
1. [Otto now sets up every new agent](#otto-now-sets-up-every-new-agent)
2. [The whole dashboard is much faster](#the-whole-dashboard-is-much-faster)
3. [Your website's PDFs, read like pages](#your-websites-pdfs-read-like-pages)
4. [Find out why your agent missed a page](#find-out-why-your-agent-missed-a-page)
5. [Smaller improvements and fixes](#smaller-improvements-and-fixes)
6. [Moving from a Custom GPT?](#moving-from-a-custom-gpt)
7. [Try it](#try-it)
The hardest part of a new agent has always been the first ten minutes. You stare at an empty **Prompt** box, add your homepage as a data source, and end up with an agent that knows one page of your business and introduces itself like a form letter.
This release fixes that. **New bot** now opens Otto, which builds the agent with you from your website. And once you're in, the whole dashboard is much faster: pages open straight away instead of waiting on the server.
Your agent can also read the brochures, price lists and guides your site links to as PDFs. **Document Search** can now tell you why your agent missed a page. And a handful of fixes make signing up, signing in and connecting Telegram less of a fight, and the chat widget now loads on `http://` websites too.
## Otto now sets up every new agent
In July we added [Otto](https://chatthing.ai/docs/get-started/otto), the assistant on every agent's page that explains, changes and tests it. Since then, some new accounts have also had Otto run their setup. We then reviewed 73 recently created agents without knowing how each was set up. The ones Otto built scored 6.2 out of 10 on average, against 3.9 for the ones set up through the form, mostly because Otto writes much better instructions, welcome messages and settings. So it's now how every new agent starts.
1. Go to **My Bots** and click **New bot**. **Set up your agent with AI** opens.
2. Tell Otto about your business and what the agent should do, or paste your website address. You can also pick a starting point such as **Answer customer questions on my site** or **Capture and qualify leads**.
3. Answer its questions. As it works, the **Your agent** panel fills in: **Personality & voice**, **Knowledge**, **Power-ups** and **Branding**.
4. Try the agent in the **Live preview**, then click **Open dashboard**.
A few things make the result better than a blank form:
- **It reads your whole site.** Otto finds your pages from your sitemap or by crawling, then adds the useful ones as knowledge.
- **It checks the knowledge actually arrived.** If a sync comes back empty, Otto tells you and tries another way in, rather than leaving you with an agent that knows nothing.
- **It keeps the agent honest.** Otto won't word your agent as if it can book meetings, capture leads or hand over to a person unless it has the Power-Up that does it. It tells you what's missing before it hands over.
Prefer to do it yourself? Click **Set up manually** at any point and you get the step-by-step form, now shorter, with a welcome message already filled in. Everything is in [Build your first bot](https://chatthing.ai/docs/get-started/build-your-first-bot).
Setup also works properly on a phone now. Otto's panel folds into a bar under the chat, and the message box no longer makes iPhones zoom in. If your connection drops halfway, Otto checks on the agent it was building instead of starting a second one.
One related fix applies to agents you already have: if an agent's **Prompt** was saved empty, it now uses the default instructions instead of none at all.
## The whole dashboard is much faster
This is the change you'll notice every time you log in. We rebuilt how the dashboard loads, and moving around it should now feel close to instant.
- **Pages open straight away.** The dashboard shows what you saw last time the moment you open a page, then quietly checks for anything new. Switching between an agent's tabs, such as **Data sources**, **Power-ups**, **Channels** and **Settings**, no longer means waiting on the server each time.
- **It gets the next page ready before you click.** Point at a link and the dashboard starts loading that page. While you're reading one of an agent's tabs, it gets the others ready in the background.
- **No more blank screens.** While anything is still loading, you see the outline of the page in its place, so nothing jumps around when the content arrives.
- **Less to download.** The app downloads about a third less code when it first opens, so a fresh visit starts faster too.
Anything to do with your plan and billing is always fresh: it updates when you come back to the tab and straight after a purchase.
A few things look different. On a phone, **Conversations** opens on the list and a conversation opens when you tap it, and the buttons in an agent's header are icons only. If you're on a trial, its banner now sits in the top bar.
## Your website's PDFs, read like pages
Plenty of the answers your visitors want are in the brochure, the price list, the care guide or the terms you've linked as a PDF. Until now a website data source skipped those.
Now it reads them. PDFs that a crawl finds, or that your sitemap lists, go into your agent like any other page, and answers link back to the PDF. Each one is titled from the largest text on its first page, which is usually the document's title, and falls back to the file name.
- **New website data sources** include PDFs automatically.
- **Older website data sources** have it turned off, so nothing changes until you choose. Open the data source's **Scraping settings** tab, turn on **Include PDFs** under **PDFs**, click **Save**, then sync.
If you limit a crawl to one section of your site, PDFs linked from that section are still added, even when your site stores them somewhere else. PDFs use storage tokens for all their text, the same as uploading the file, so after a crawl check the **Content** tab and remove any you don't need before you sync. See [Include PDFs from your site](https://chatthing.ai/docs/knowledge/website#include-pdfs-from-your-site).
## Find out why your agent missed a page
When an agent gets something wrong, the first question is usually "did it even read the right page?". **Document Search** now answers that properly. You'll find it at the bottom of your agent's **Data sources** tab, and on each data source's **View documents** tab.
Type a question the way a visitor would ask it and click **Search Documents**. You get the top 50 matches, each with the page or file it came from, and two lines through the list: documents above **Max context documents** are the ones your agent would read, and anything below **Relevance threshold** is a near miss. Move either slider and the list updates without searching again. Click any result to read it in full, or switch to **As the bot sees it** for the exact text your agent is given.
If the page you expected isn't there, paste its URL, title or file name into **Where's my page?** and click **Check**. It tells you whether the page was never added, hasn't synced, synced with no text, scored too low or was pushed out by other documents, and what to do about each. It works on a phone too. See [Test what your bot finds](https://chatthing.ai/docs/knowledge/retrieval-settings#test-what-your-bot-finds).
## Smaller improvements and fixes
- **Cards in your brand colour, and a Key figures layout.** If your web chat has **Custom theming** on, the cards your agent shows now use your **Primary colour** when a visitor points at them, instead of our indigo. There's also a third **Card layout** next to **Horizontal** and **Vertical**: **Key figures**, which shows large headline numbers filled with your primary colour, each with a line of context. The **Display cards** Power-Up can choose it by itself, and you can steer it in the Power-Up's **Description**, for example "Use the key figures layout for rates and other headline numbers". [Displays](https://chatthing.ai/docs/power-ups/displays#cards)
- **Telegram channels connect again.** Turning on Telegram and saving could fail with "Error updating channel", so a new Telegram channel couldn't be connected from its settings page. That's fixed. [Telegram](https://chatthing.ai/docs/channels/telegram)
- **No more false login errors.** Some people with the right password were told their sign-in had failed, usually on their first visit. Error messages now say what actually went wrong, and if your email isn't confirmed yet you get a **Resend confirmation email** button. [Sign-in and account](https://chatthing.ai/docs/account/sign-in-and-account)
- **A friendlier sign-up form.** Your website is optional, you don't have to type `https://`, and there are two new use cases to pick from: **AI phone receptionist** and **Website voice agent**.
- **Context size stays put.** Saving an agent's settings could quietly shrink its **Max context size** to 4,096 tokens, which made it forget the conversation, especially after a Power-Up call. Leaving the field empty now means the model's maximum, and new agents start at 64,000. If you've seen an agent lose track of a conversation, check this setting. [Settings reference](https://chatthing.ai/docs/bot-settings/settings-reference)
- **Deleting a conversation keeps your analytics.** Usage figures, topics, sentiment and engagement keep counting a deleted conversation, without its transcript or anything that identifies the visitor. [Analytics](https://chatthing.ai/docs/manage/analytics#deleted-conversations)
- **Your own OpenAI key and retrieval.** On teams using their own OpenAI key, some models couldn't rewrite the visitor's question before searching your knowledge, so searches were less precise. They now can.
- **The chat widget works on `http://` sites.** If your website still runs on `http://` rather than `https://`, visitors could see an error page where the chat should be. The widget now loads on both. [Add the chat widget](https://chatthing.ai/docs/channels/website/install)
- **Updates no longer hang up calls.** When we released an update, voice and phone calls in progress could be cut off. Calls now carry on until they end.
- **New webhooks switch themselves on.** An outgoing webhook now turns on the first time you save it with a target URL, and a sync trigger webhook is on as soon as you create it. Before, new webhooks were created switched off and nothing turned them on, so a webhook could look fully set up and never send anything. Webhooks you saved and left off before this change stay as they are. [Webhooks](https://chatthing.ai/docs/developers/webhooks)
- **No more lost settings.** If you leave an agent's **General settings** with changes you haven't saved, it now asks **Leave without saving?**, and your browser warns you before a reload or closing the tab.
- **Data source limits up front.** When an agent has used every data source your plan includes, **Choose a data source** now says so, with an **Upgrade plan** button, instead of an error each time you click **Create**. [Manage data sources](https://chatthing.ai/docs/knowledge/manage-data-sources)
- **No more dead buttons in agent settings.** If a setting you can't currently see stops the form saving, a message now tells you which one, and the page scrolls to the first problem it can show you.
## Moving from a Custom GPT?
OpenAI has scheduled Custom GPTs to retire on 11 December 2026, and shared GPT links stop working when they do. If other people use your GPT, such as customers, clients or students, [Move a Custom GPT to Chat Thing](https://chatthing.ai/docs/get-started/move-from-a-custom-gpt) walks you through rebuilding it as an agent you can share by link or put on your website. The people using it won't need a ChatGPT account. We've also written an honest [comparison with Custom GPTs](https://chatthing.ai/pages/alternatives/openai-custom-gpts), including where a GPT is still the better choice.
## Try it
[Create a new agent](https://app.chatthing.ai/app/bots/wizard) and let Otto set it up from your website, or open an older website data source and turn on **Include PDFs**. If something doesn't work the way this post says, tell us in the chat on [chatthing.ai](https://chatthing.ai).
### **Related articles **
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Your Chat Thing agent can now use tools from any MCP server, run your Make scenarios and book meetings in the chat. Plus a Search API, faster Notion syncs and Claude Sonnet 5.5.
[](https://chatthing.ai/blog/citations-call-summaries-and-eight-new-models) [Inline citations, phone call summaries and eight new models
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Chat Thing agents can now hold voice conversations in your web chat and answer a US or UK phone number, with the same knowledge, power-ups and AI model you've already set up.
- **Previous **
- [← Custom GPTs retire on 11 December: what changes and what to do](https://chatthing.ai/blog/custom-gpts-retiring)