Entry Points #

An Entry Point is a routing rule: it says “when this happens on this channel, hand the conversation to this Agent.” Entry Points are how an AI Agent picks up a conversation it wasn’t already part of — a new contact messaging in for the first time, someone commenting a keyword on a post, or a specific word appearing in an incoming message.

Not a workflow builder. An Entry Point only ever does one thing: match an event and assign an Agent. There are no delays, conditions, tag actions, or branching — that level of automation lives in Automations, a separate part of the platform.

Entry Point Routing Is Live #

Entry Points decide who answers a new conversation on every account. A contact who is already in a conversation keeps their assigned Agent, with its history. The one exception is a Keyword rule: a contact already talking to another Agent moves to the keyword’s Agent when their message starts with the keyword (a keyword further into the message does not move them), unless a team member assigned their Agent by hand. (A comment rule still sends its public reply and its first DM to a contact who already has a chat; the DM is skipped only when the AI is paused on that contact’s chat, for example because a person took over or the Agent handed the chat to a human.) To hand an existing chat to a different Agent, use Assign AI Agent in the chat’s menu, or the Assign AI agent or campaign action in Automations when you want it to happen by rule (an incoming message containing a keyword, for example). Step-by-step: Switch AI Agent Mid-Conversation. The Who Answers New Conversations panel on the AI Agents page shows a green Live badge when every connected channel has an Agent picked, and an amber count for any channel still unanswered. When you have two or more active Agents, a channel with no Entry Point and no channel default gets no automatic reply (with exactly one active Agent, that Agent answers every channel you have not set to No one’s answering; see below), and we send you a notification when a message arrives that nothing on your account is set up to answer.

Entry Point Types #

Each rule applies to one or more channels and points to exactly one Agent. Keyword and comment rules are checked first, and a Channel Default only catches whatever they didn’t match — so a Channel Default is always your fallback, never a competing rule.

In the rules list, each channel chip also names the connected identity it applies to — “WhatsApp: +13128654312”, “Email: sales@example.com”, “Instagram: @yourshop” — so you can tell at a glance which number, inbox or account a rule guards.

Instagram Comment and Facebook Comment rules that watch specific posts also show small thumbnails of those posts on their card, with the first post’s caption next to them. Hover a thumbnail to read its caption, or click it to open the post on Instagram or Facebook. Under the thumbnails, the card shows what the rule sends: the first DM in Exact text mode, the public reply when DMs are off, or your reply instructions in AI mode. That way several comment rules on the same account each look different, and you can find the one for a given reel without opening every rule. A post that was deleted, or a rule on an account whose Instagram or Facebook is no longer connected, falls back to the post count.

A Keyword rule also works as a gate on its own: if a channel has a Keyword rule and no Channel Default, messages that don’t contain one of the keywords get no automatic reply and simply land in your inbox for a human — even when you only have one Agent on the account. So “reply only when they say AURUM” is just a Keyword rule with AURUM as the keyword and nothing else set for that channel.

How a keyword is matched: when the whole message is the keyword (capital letters and extra spaces don’t matter), the rule fires straight away. The same goes when the keyword is the first line of a longer message, so a prefilled message such as “DEMO” followed by a few lines about the person still fires the DEMO rule; a keyword on a later line, or inside a longer first line, is left to the AI check. For any other longer message, an AI check decides whether the person meant your keyword, so it also matches the keyword inside a sentence or with a typo, and normally not a longer word that only contains it (“rematch” does not count for MATCH). The app has no switch to turn that AI check off; over the API you can set match_config.fuzzy_match to false for exact matching only (the whole message or its first line). Tip: pick a keyword people would not type in a normal sentence.

Rules apply per channel by default: if you have several WhatsApp numbers connected to one account, they share the same routing rules. The one exception is a Channel Default scoped to a single number — with two or more WhatsApp or WhatsApp Web numbers connected, you can give each number its own Agent (see the per-number section below). For anything finer, use Keyword rules; to keep whole branches or brands fully separate (their own Agents, contacts, and reporting), use separate sub-accounts.

The two comment types carry three settings of their own: Comment keywords (which comments count — empty means all of them), Which posts (All posts, or Specific posts — click Choose posts and tick them from a list of your recent posts and reels; pasting Post IDs is still there for anything the list doesn’t show), and First response (AI, or Exact text with your own public comment reply and first DM message). You can also set a delay in minutes before either goes out. Two more switches: Send a DM (untick it and the Agent only leaves the public reply under the comment, nobody is messaged privately and no follow-ups go out) and Archive after the first DM (in either mode, the chat is archived as soon as the first DM is sent and comes back by itself when the person replies). With the DM off in Exact text mode, the public reply is the only thing the rule sends, so it cannot be saved empty. The Agent also reads the caption of the post the comment was left on and keeps it for the whole conversation, so the public reply, the first DM and every later DM know which post the person reacted to. See Comment-to-DM Automation.

Creating an Entry Point #

Entry Points are managed from the Entry Points tab inside an Agent’s editor:

1. Open the Agent you want the rule to route to.
2. Go to the Entry Points tab.
3. Click New Entry Point.
4. Choose a type.

5. Pick the channel(s) it applies to (locked to a single channel for Instagram Comment, Facebook Comment, and Instagram Follower rules).
6. Fill in the match details for that type — keywords; the posts to watch (tick them from the Choose posts list, or leave All posts selected to watch every post); and, for comment rules, any delay before the automated reply goes out.

For comment rules, Comment keywords decides which comments count. Add the word people are told to comment (“LINK”, “INFO”) and only those comments get a DM. Leave it empty and every comment on the watched posts gets one, which is what you want on a post built around a single call to action, and expensive on a busy post where most comments are just conversation.

7. For Keyword, Instagram Comment, and Facebook Comment rules, choose First Response: AI lets the Agent write its own opening reply, or Exact Text sends a fixed message you write yourself (plus a separate public comment reply, for comment types) — the AI only takes over once the customer responds. You can personalize the Exact Text message with {{first_name}} — it’s replaced with the commenter’s first name, or with “there” when their name isn’t available (Instagram usually doesn’t share it).

   On a Keyword rule, the Exact Text is the reply to the message that matched the keyword, sent on whatever channel it arrived on. It costs 0 credits and it goes out word for word. By default it goes out even outside the Agent’s active hours — it’s your wording, not the Agent’s, so an out-of-hours “got it, we’ll be with you in the morning” behaves the way you wrote it. The Agent picks the conversation up from the customer’s next message, and from then on its active hours apply as usual. If the customer does not answer, the Agent’s automatic follow-ups run from that fixed message the same way they would after an AI-written reply: the first follow-up is scheduled the moment the message goes out, with the delays set on the Agent’s Follow-ups tab (see Follow-ups). Leave the message empty and the rule falls back to an AI-written first reply, so a half-finished rule never leaves someone unanswered. Because it costs nothing, it also goes out when the account has run out of credits, so it is the one reply that still reaches people on an empty balance.

   Five things do stop it: the AI paused for that chat, a contact marked private, a contact on Do not disturb, a chat a human has taken over, and Pause all AI for the whole account. In each of those nothing is sent at all, so a pause you set by hand stays a pause.

   Respect active hours. Tick this box under the Exact Text message when nothing should go out while you are closed (a clinic that must stay silent at night, for example). With it on, a keyword that comes in outside the Agent’s active hours is not answered straight away: the chat waits under the Outside hours filter in Chats and your Exact Text is sent as soon as the Agent’s next active window starts. It is not dropped. If you or a teammate reply by hand in the meantime, the waiting message is not sent. If the customer writes again while they wait, the Exact Text goes out first and the Agent then answers their newer messages. Inside active hours the box changes nothing. It is off on every rule until you tick it.

8. Toggle it Enabled.
9. Click Save.

You can enable or disable a rule at any time without deleting it. Only one Channel Default can be enabled per channel — creating a new one automatically disables any other enabled default already set for that same channel, whether it was set on this Agent or another.

Who Answers New Conversations #

Who Answers New Conversations is the panel at the top of the AI Agents page — it’s where you set the Channel Default entry point for every connected channel in one place, rather than one at a time from inside an Agent. It’s collapsed to a one-line summary when every channel already has an answer, and opens automatically the moment any channel doesn’t.

For each connected channel you’ll see a picker to choose which Agent should answer a new, unmatched conversation there. If you have exactly one active Agent on the account, that Agent is shown automatically as the answer for every channel (labelled “your only agent”) — the panel is being honest that it will answer, not implying you still need to configure something. The one exception is a channel with a Keyword rule: there the Agent only answers messages that match a keyword, so the panel shows that channel as keyword-only instead. The moment you create a second Agent, any channel without an explicit pick shows as unanswered until you choose one.

The picker also offers No one’s answering — pick it and the AI stays out of new conversations on that channel entirely; messages simply land in your inbox for your team to handle. This works on every account, including one with a single Agent: the channel stays quiet even though that Agent answers everywhere else, so you can keep the AI on WhatsApp while a human handles, say, Instagram. A channel you’ve deliberately silenced shows calmly with No one’s answering selected — it doesn’t count as unanswered, doesn’t turn the panel amber, and never triggers the “nothing is set up to answer” notification. To hand the channel back to the AI, just pick an Agent again.

One Agent per WhatsApp number #

If you have two or more numbers connected on WhatsApp Web or the WhatsApp Business API, the panel adds a per number block underneath the channel rows — one row per connected number, each with its own picker. Pick a different Agent for each number and a new conversation is answered by the Agent that belongs to the number the customer wrote to. That’s how a business with several branches, brands or languages runs them all from one account instead of a separate account per branch: the Amsterdam number gets the Amsterdam Agent, the Rotterdam number the Rotterdam one, each with its own instructions, FAQs and booking setup.

Every number starts on Same as WhatsApp (or Same as WhatsApp Web) — it simply follows whatever you chose for the channel above, so nothing changes until you pick something for a specific number. A number can also be set to No one’s answering on its own, which keeps the AI off that one number while the others keep replying. To hand a number back to the channel’s Agent, pick Same as… again. Replies always go out from the number the customer messaged, so a contact who wrote to your second number keeps talking to that number and that Agent.

The same choice is available from inside an Agent: on its Entry Points tab, add a Channel Default for WhatsApp or WhatsApp Web and, when two or more numbers are connected on that channel, a Number picker appears — leave it on All numbers for the channel-wide default, or pick one number to make this Agent answer that number only. A number-scoped rule shows the number as a chip in the list, so it never looks identical to the channel-wide default.

A per-number pick only decides who picks up a new conversation. Contacts already talking to an Agent stay with it (unless their message starts with a Keyword rule’s keyword, see above), and a Keyword or Broadcast rule that matches still wins first, exactly as for the channel-level pick.

The Agent you pick for a channel here is the one that answers a new, unmatched conversation on that channel, and these picks are live. When every connected channel has an answer the panel collapses to a one-line summary with a green Live badge; any channel left without one shows amber, and new contacts there get no automatic reply until you choose an Agent.

If you don’t have any Agents yet, create one from the AI Agents page first, then come back to set channel defaults.

Next Steps #

• AI Agents — what an Agent is and how to create or edit one.
• Comment-to-DM Automation — turning Instagram and Facebook comments into DMs. Set these up as Instagram Comment or Facebook Comment Entry Points on the Agent that should answer.