Feature
The bot tells you where it failed.
This is the part that makes Ask more than a chatbot. A bot that answers 80% of questions and says nothing about the other 20% has hidden your best feedback. Ask flags those conversations while they happen and puts them somewhere you'll actually read them.
The four states
A state is something that happened in a conversation and is worth your attention. They're detected as the conversation runs, not batched overnight.
The bot could not answer
Somebody asked something your material does not cover. This is the single most useful signal in the product: it is a content gap with a real question attached.
The visitor asked for a follow-up
They want a person, a call back, or a quote. Usually they leave an address, which is stored as a structured field on the case rather than fished back out of the transcript.
The visitor was unhappy
Frustration, repetition, an outright complaint. Sometimes the bot was wrong; sometimes the answer was right and the wording was bad. Both are worth knowing.
The bot had stopped answering
Your included usage ran out and the bot told the visitor it cannot answer right now. This one is not about the bot's quality - it's about people who turned up and got nothing.
One conversation, one case
States accumulate onto the same case rather than opening a new one each time, so a conversation that went wrong twice is one thing to read, not two.
01
The full transcript
Rendered as plain text, with a timestamp per turn, the model tier and instruction version each answer came from, and the citations the bot used.
02
The states, at the turn they fired
Marked inline in the transcript, so you can see the exact exchange that produced the flag. If the detection was wrong, you can correct it.
03
Whatever they left behind
An email address, a name, a phone number - captured deliberately through a form in the widget, kept as structured fields. Personal details detected in the transcript itself are masked by default, and revealing them is an audited action.
Where cases go
Three options, set per bot and per state.
- Keep them in the inbox. The default. Nothing leaves Ask.
- Email them. A different address per state if you want - sales gets the follow-up requests, you get the failures. Outbound email starts once your widget's domain is verified.
- Post them to a webhook. Signed, retried, and a notification when delivery keeps failing. On the paid plans.
This is a feedback loop, not a helpdesk
There are no SLAs, no assignment and no ticket lifecycle, and there aren't going to be. A case is resolved when you have done something about it - written an entry, fixed the instructions, called the person back. The most valuable button in the inbox is "write an entry from this question", which opens the entry editor pre-filled from the question the bot failed.
Then the improvement loop takes over: replay your draft against every question that previously failed before you publish it.