Every conversation with a business chatbot comes down to three questions. Who is asking? Who should answer? And does it feel like talking to this business, or to a generic bot in its clothes?
Gydr 4.0 is our answer to all three. It is a major release. A few old ways of doing things were removed, and the migration page lists each one with its replacement.
Who is asking: one visitor token
Telling your chatbot who is signed in now takes one thing: the token your site already issues for the signed-in visitor. Your page hands it over and Gydr checks it, in one of three ways you choose in Settings → Visitor sign-in. That person's history and memory then follow them on every device. Signed-in visitors carry your own ID for them in the Console, in webhooks, in the Conversation API and in exports.
Identity is the part of a chatbot that is easiest to get dangerously wrong, so we wrote about it at length in Knowing who you're talking to.
Who should answer: help desks your way
Handing a conversation to your team is now yours to shape. Each help desk can run live chat, tickets, or both, and when both are on the visitor chooses. With tickets, Gydr writes a short summary of the conversation for your team and files each ticket only once. Zendesk joins as an integration for every account, and Custom Desk lets your developers connect a help desk we do not support yet, through a documented and secure contract.
The chatbot also notices when a conversation is going badly and offers a person before the visitor has to ask. The whole story is in A person, when it matters.
How it feels: a Design studio
Brands are particular about how they look, and they should be. The new Design studio lets you style the chat widget on a live preview, no code needed. Start from a ready-made look, then switch on dark mode, choose from curated fonts, add your logo to the header, set the launcher icon, and pick a Spotlight welcome screen or card-style suggested questions. You can preview the form, handoff and offline screens before you publish. For full control you can add your own CSS, and Gydr checks it before saving and points to anything it cannot accept.
What visitors actually ask: Conversation Topics
Reading every conversation does not scale, and a word cloud does not tell you much. Conversation Topics groups conversations into topics automatically and shows what visitors ask about most, what they were trying to do, and whether they got what they needed. You can add, rename or merge topics yourself, and export the results. Topic analysis is opt-in and uses credits.
The Analytics and Handoff dashboards changed in the same spirit. Each now opens with a short written summary of how things are going, built only from your own numbers, followed by the figures behind it.
And more
After each reply, the chatbot can suggest a few next questions as tappable chips, on your website and on Messenger, Instagram and Telegram. Importing your website into a knowledge base now offers three clear methods, lets you pick exactly which pages to bring in, and estimates the credits from your own pages before you start. The import stops on its own before it would use more credits than you have. Console notifications moved into an email-style inbox.
Safer by default
We also closed several ways that someone holding only a widget's public key could read or change another visitor's data: by guessing a visitor ID, by overwriting details or form answers without proof, or by reaching a messaging-channel visitor from the website widget. Gydr now creates every visitor ID itself. A page, a link or an API call can no longer choose one.
The fixes themselves need nothing from you. If your site used to set its own visitor IDs, the migration page explains what changes. We mention all of this because you should know how the platform you trust with your customers protects them.
Frequently asked questions
What is new in Gydr 4.0?
One visitor token for signed-in visitors, live chat or tickets per help desk with Zendesk and Custom Desk, the Design studio, Conversation Topics, follow-up suggestions and a rebuilt website import.
Does Gydr 4.0 break existing setups?
Some. The old identify calls, tokens signed with a shared secret and visitor IDs set by your own page stopped working; the migration page lists each one with its replacement.
Does Conversation Topics cost extra?
It is opt-in and uses credits.
The full list of changes, including the breaking changes, is in the 4.0.0 release notes.