Documentation

Everything you need to go live.

A quick tour of how Tephlo works — from connecting your first channel to how grounded answers and human handoff keep customers safe.

Quickstart

You can be answering live customer messages in three steps. No scripts, no decision trees.

Prerequisite. A WhatsApp Business number (via Meta) or a Telegram bot token. Tephlo verifies the connection before it ever goes live.
  1. Connect a channel — add your WhatsApp or Telegram credentials in the console.
  2. Add your knowledge — upload the docs your bot should answer from.
  3. Go live — the AI handles the front line; your agents supervise and step in when needed.

Every workspace also gets instant sandbox share links and QR codes on the console’s Share page, so you can try your assistant on Tephlo’s shared number before connecting a production one.

Core concepts

Grounded answers

Tephlo doesn’t free-associate. It retrieves the most relevant passages from your knowledge base and answers only from what it can cite. If it can’t find a grounded answer, it says so and hands off — it never invents facts, prices, or policies.

Escalation

When a conversation needs a person — an explicit request, a sensitive issue, visible customer frustration, or low confidence — Tephlo escalates it to your team with the full history and the reason it escalated. The customer is told honestly why a person is stepping in; if you’ve configured business hours and your team is offline, they’re told when you’ll be back, and Tephlo checks in automatically if the wait drags.

Languages

Tephlo detects the language each customer writes in and replies in it — grounded answers, ticket confirmations, handoff notices, and follow-ups included. Your knowledge base can stay in one language; Tephlo translates the facts faithfully and keeps order numbers and other identifiers verbatim.

Connect a channel

Tephlo supports three channels today:

  • WhatsApp Business — connect your phone number ID, WABA, and tokens. Tephlo completes the webhook handshake with Meta (challenge + signature) before the channel can be enabled, so it’s never live without a proven inbound path.
  • Telegram — add your bot token; Tephlo derives the identity and starts receiving updates.
  • Web chat — put the same assistant on your own website: paste a one-line script from the console’s Settings page. No external account needed.
Safe by default. A channel can’t be enabled until it’s verified end-to-end. If verification later fails, Tephlo auto-disables it rather than silently dropping messages.

Add your knowledge

Upload PDFs, Word docs, and text files — or paste content directly. Tephlo indexes them within minutes using hybrid retrieval (semantic + keyword), so answers cite the exact passage they came from.

You can set validity windows on sources and mark them verified, so stale documents don’t quietly drive answers.

Supported: .pdf  .docx  .txt  .md  ·  or paste raw text

Human handoff

Escalated conversations land in the Agent Console. An agent takes over in one tap and replies directly to the customer over the same channel — the customer never repeats themselves. When it’s resolved, the conversation returns to the bot.

Catalog & memory

Add a structured product catalog and Tephlo answers price, stock, and spec questions exactly — no hallucinated numbers. Customer memory carries a customer’s preferences and past context into every future conversation.

Agent Studio & analytics

Agent Studio is where your assistant compounds: review and approve canonical answers so they’re reused instantly, see why conversations escalate and record what your team found, set business hours, and run evaluations before changes go live. Tephlo also mines repeat questions and suggests answers for one-click approval.

The Analytics view shows your automation rate, daily volume, peak hours, escalation reasons, tickets captured, languages served, and how much work answer reuse saved.

Security & privacy

  • Multi-tenant isolation — each workspace’s data is scoped and separated.
  • Enforced MFA for operators, with full audit trails on credential and config changes.
  • Channel secrets encrypted at rest.
  • Privacy tooling to export or delete a customer’s data on request.

The two consoles

Tephlo ships with two apps: the Agent Console for your support team (queue, knowledge, conversations) and the Operator Console for platform administrators (tenants, channels, routing, health).

Need a hand getting set up? Talk to our team — we’ll help you connect your first channel.