When the AI chatbot is active, a human agent using Live Chat might accidentally send overlapping responses, leading to confusion for users. To resolve this, you can set up secret keywords to pause and reactivate the chatbot. These keywords must be sent by the account’s admin to work. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to implement these keywords and share a clever trick to let users pause and restart the AI themselves, streamlining interactions for everyone.

Adding the keywords

To add the keywords that will pause the bot, open your account and go to the WhatsApp Module. Open the chatbot section, and click on the item list of the account where you wish to add the keywords. Once inside the item list, go the chatbot settings. There you will find a field for the word to disable the bot, and one to enable it, as shown in the video below.

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Once the keywords are set, the account administrator must send them for them to take effect. You can do this through the WhatsApp LiveChat by opening the conversation for the account where the keywords were configured.

Double click on a conversation to open it, and send the word to stop the chatbot. In the example below, the keyword to stop the bot was “Disable” and the agent sent the next message.

When you are done talking with the customer, send the word you set to enable the bot. The chatbot will start working and answering subsequent messages.

Allowing users to stop the bot

Sometimes, you might want users to be able to pause the chatbot on their own. For instance, you could allow users to send a specific word, like “DISABLE,” when they want to speak with a human agent. As soon as they send this keyword, the chatbot would stop responding, allowing you to easily identify these conversations in the LiveChat and intervene directly. To achieve this, the chatbot needs to automatically trigger the pause keyword when it receives the user’s command.

Let’s walk through the process. Start by adding the keywords to pause and resume the bot. In this example, we’ll use “🔴 Chatbot disabled” to stop the bot and “🟢 Chatbot enabled” to turn it back on.

Submit, go back to the Item list and add a new item.

Here, we’ll guide our users to send the word “DISABLE” when they want to speak with a human agent. In the keyword section, list various ways they might request this, such as “human agent,” “speak with human,” or similar phrases.

Then, in the caption space, provide a clear response, like: “To speak with a human agent, send the word DISABLE in this chat to pause the bot and wait for a human agent to respond.”

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Click Submit to save your changes, then proceed to add another item. For this item, set the keyword as DISABLE, and for the chatbot’s response, use the pause keyword you configured earlier. In this example, that would be: “🔴 Chatbot disabled.”

This item is what actually pauses the bot. Don’t forget to click Save when you’re done to ensure your changes are applied.

Here’s how this sequence looks in a real conversation. As you can see, the customer triggered the item containing the pause keyword, and the bot was stopped, allowing the agent to intervene seamlessly.

Once the agent finished talking with the customer, she simply sent the keyword to resume the bot. This way, if the customer sends another message, the chatbot will be able to answer and solve his doubts.