Troubleshooting

Builder Troubleshooting

This guide covers the common things you'll need to do as a builder of assistants: keeping them running, making them better, and helping out the people who use them. If you're chatting with someone else's assistant rather than building your own, this isn't the guide for you.

Running Out of Credits

Check your balance on Manage Account if assistants stop responding. Low-credit warnings, the grace period, resets, and ways to add credits are explained in what happens when credits run out.

Choosing Standard or Premium AI

Change the model in the assistant's Settings. See choosing Premium or Standard AI for advice and billing and plans for availability and downgrade behaviour.

Editing Assistants

Choose Edit from the assistant menu, describe the change, review it, and select Update Assistant. See editing and iterating for guidance. Settings handles quick changes such as the name, model, capabilities, and enabled state.

When Conversations Aren't Going Well

If you've noticed an assistant giving rubbish answers, missing the point, or frustrating the people using it, you've got a few levers to pull.

Diagnose Before Fixing

Open Activity from the assistant menu to see how much it is being used and how many escalations are open
Read the recent escalations, where you can see the conversation each one came from and what was actually said
Try the Test chat yourself with the kind of question that's been going wrong

A conversation that never escalated stays private to the person having it, so escalations and your own test chats are where the detail is.

Things to Try

Edit the assistant to add the missing information or correct the framing. This is usually the best fix
Sharpen the audience description if the assistant is pitching at the wrong level, for example "absolute beginner with no technical background"
Switch to Premium if the topic is genuinely complex and Standard is missing the nuance
Disable and rebuild as a last resort. If an assistant has drifted a long way from what you need, sometimes it's faster to start over with a fresh one

If the problem looks like a Deputise bug rather than an assistant issue, raise a support ticket (see below).

Disabling and Enabling Assistants

To pause an assistant, turn Enabled off in its Settings and save. See enabling and disabling assistants for the effect on chats and tier limits if you cannot enable it again.

Use Share from the assistant menu to invite someone by name and email. See sharing with people for invitation expiry and access management.

If an invitation has not been accepted, check the address and whether it has expired. To understand early use, review escalations and ask the recipient for feedback. Chats that have not escalated remain private to the person chatting.

Answering Escalations

Sometimes your assistant won't be able to help with a question. When the person chatting asks to speak to someone, the assistant will escalate the conversation to you.

How Escalations Work

The person chatting explicitly asks for human help, such as "can you get the owner to help?" or "I want to talk to a person"
The assistant passes the question to you and lets the person know someone will get back to them
You're told what was asked, why the assistant couldn't help, and how urgent it is. Notifications use push when available and email as a fallback, subject to your notification preferences
The person's chat is paused on that thread until you respond, for up to 48 hours. After that the request lapses, the asker is told it went unanswered, and the assistant picks the conversation back up

Responding to Escalations

When you receive an escalation:

Click the link in the email, or open the conversation from the assistant's space, to view it
Read through the chat history to understand the context
Send your response. The person can read it in the chat and is notified according to their notification preferences
They can continue the conversation, and the assistant can pick things up again afterwards

Mark the escalation as resolved once you're satisfied the person has what they need. That is the only action it takes, and it can't be undone, so a question that resolved itself or turned out to be a misunderstanding is resolved the same way.

Urgency Levels

Escalations are tagged with an urgency level to help you prioritise. These are guessed by the system based on what the person said, so they could be wrong and it's worth glancing at the message itself:

Low means we think the person is asking but it's not time-sensitive
Medium means we think this is a standard request that needs attention
High means the person indicated it's urgent or important, and the email subject is flagged as urgent too

Using Escalations to Improve Your Assistants

Escalations are a great signal for what your assistant is missing. If you notice the same topics coming up:

Go to your assistant and click Edit
Describe the new information the assistant needs to handle that topic
Save the changes, and future conversations on that topic should be handled without escalation

Over time, your escalation rate should drop as you fold answers back into the assistant.

Raising Support Tickets

If you need help with Deputise itself, whether it's a technical issue, a billing question, or something that doesn't seem right, you can raise a support ticket. This is available to anyone on a paid tier.

For everyone else, we monitor for errors and issues. You can also always send us an email and we'll try to take a look.

How to Raise a Ticket

Open Support from the sidebar and raise a ticket from there
Type your question or describe the issue
Send your message, and a ticket is created automatically
You'll receive an acknowledgement straight away, and someone from the team will review your ticket as soon as possible

Pro tier customers get priority support, so their tickets are pushed to the front of the queue.

Checking on Your Tickets

Your recent support tickets are listed on the Support page. You can click on any ticket to:

See the full conversation history
Send follow-up messages
Check the current status

Ticket Statuses

New: your ticket has been created and is waiting for review
Active: someone from the team is working on it
Resolved: the issue has been addressed
Closed: the ticket is complete

If a resolved ticket hasn't fully addressed your question, you can send another message to reopen it.

Tips for Effective Support Tickets

Be specific. Include what you were trying to do, what happened, and what you expected
Mention the assistant. If the issue is related to a specific one, include its name
Keep it to one issue per ticket, which helps us track and resolve things faster