Build and manage bots with Otto

Otto is Chat Thing's built-in assistant. Instead of hunting through settings, tell Otto what you want and it makes the change, then explains what it did.

ℹ️

Before you start

Who can do this: team owners and admins. Members with other roles don't see the Ask Otto button, because Otto's changes need write access to the bot.

Otto helps in two places:

When you create a bot, Chat Thing's setup assistant can build the bot with you in a conversation. See Build your first bot.
Inside an existing bot, the Ask Otto button opens Otto in a side panel where it can explain, change and test that bot.

Ask Otto about a bot

Open any page of your bot.
Click Ask Otto in the page header, next to Embed, Test and Open bot.
Type what you want, or pick a suggestion such as Review this bot's setup and suggest improvements.

The Ask Otto button in a bot's page header, alongside Embed, Test and Open bot

Otto opens beside the dashboard, so the page stays visible and you can watch changes land. Things you can ask:

"Add our changelog page as a data source"
"Make the tone more formal"
"Why did the bot answer that question so badly?"
"Review this bot's setup and suggest improvements"
"Set up escalation to a human when someone asks for refunds"

Otto's panel open beside the bot dashboard, showing a greeting and three suggested questions

When Otto changes something, the dashboard behind it updates straight away. Rename the bot and the new name appears in the header and the settings form while you're still talking to Otto.

After asking Otto to rename the bot, the page header, breadcrumb and the Bot name field all show the new name

🚨

Editing a form at the same time?

If you have unsaved changes in a form that Otto has just edited, Chat Thing won't quietly overwrite your work. You'll see a notice offering to reload the form with Otto's changes, so you can decide which version to keep.

Diagnose a bad answer

When someone gets a poor answer, you don't have to describe the problem from memory.

Open the conversation in Conversations.
Click Ask Otto about this chat.

Otto reads the actual exchange (what was asked, what the bot replied and which sources it used) and works out the cause. Usually it's missing or still-syncing knowledge, retrieval settings that are too strict, the bot's Prompt, or the model. Otto explains what it found, proposes a fix and applies it once you agree.

How Otto tests your bot

Otto can chat with your bot to check a fix worked and tell you which sources the answer used. These test chats are kept separate from real ones: they don't appear in Conversations and they don't trigger webhooks. Messages Otto sends to your bot use your team's message tokens, like any other chat.

🚨

Power-ups don't run in Otto's test chats

Test chats deliberately don't run power-ups, so Otto can never send a real escalation email, post to Slack or call your API while testing. That means Otto can configure a power-up but can't confirm it works. Check the result yourself in a real conversation.

What Otto won't do

Some things deliberately stay in the dashboard:

Connecting channels. Set up Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram and email in the bot's Channels tab.
Anything involving credentials. Otto never asks you to paste an API key, token or password into the chat. Enter those in the dashboard.
File uploads, and choosing Notion or Google Drive pages. Add these from the Data sources tab.
Deleting things, billing and team settings.

Otto inside a bot is scoped to that bot. It can't create new bots or change a different bot in your team, even if a message in a conversation it's reading asks it to. To build and manage bots across your account from an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT, use the Chat Thing MCP server.

🚨

Never paste secrets into the chat

Your conversations with Otto are saved so you can come back to them. Keep API keys, passwords and customers' personal data out of them.

Your chat history

Otto keeps your previous conversations for each bot so you can pick up where you left off. Click the clock icon (Chat history) at the top of the panel to see them, or the + icon to start a new chat.

If the bot was originally set up with the assistant, that setup conversation appears in the list too. It opens read-only, so you can read back through how the bot was built; click Continue in a new chat to make new changes.