Skip to main content
Updated Sep 2, 2026

Channel options: reply debounce

What you'll learn
  • Why contacts who send "split messages" used to get several replies
  • How the per-channel Reply debounce window groups them into one answer
  • How runs are serialized per conversation, and how an agent can tune the window itself

Many people write one thought as several short messages: "hi", "I have a question", "about my order". Before the reply debounce existed, every one of those messages started its own AI reply, so the contact received two or three answers that repeated or contradicted each other.

Every channel now has a Reply debounce window (milliseconds) option under its Options tab.

How the window works​

The window is trailing-edge: it starts again on every inbound message. The agent only starts its reply once the contact has been silent for the whole window, and that single reply covers everything the contact sent meanwhile.

  • Default: 3000 ms (3 seconds) on every channel type. On email channels an unset value means 0, because one mail is already one complete thought.
  • Range: 0 to 60000 ms. 0 replies immediately.
  • Text fragments are joined into one message for the agent. Media, option replies and other non-text messages are kept separate and handled in order.

The wait is short compared with the time the agent itself needs to think, so a 3-second window is rarely noticeable — and it is far less confusing than three overlapping answers.

One reply at a time, per conversation​

Independently of the window, AutoTalk now runs at most one agent reply at a time per conversation. If a contact sends another message while the agent is still working on the previous one, that message waits and is answered right after — by a run that has already seen the first reply. This holds even when the window is 0.

If the AutoTalk service restarts while a message is waiting, a background job picks it up within about a minute. Messages that waited for more than six hours are not replayed; they are marked as ignored with the reason stale_queue_expired so nothing stale is answered out of context.

Letting the agent tune the window​

An agent can notice that a particular contact writes in fragments and adjust the window for that conversation only, using the Set reply delay action (actions/agent/lifecycle/session/set_reply_delay). The override is stored on the conversation as Agent reply delay (milliseconds) and is visible in the conversation details; an operator can edit or clear it there too.

Precedence, highest first:

  1. the conversation's Agent reply delay override, when set;
  2. the channel's Reply debounce window option;
  3. the built-in default (3000 ms, or 0 for email).

Where the company-wide setting went​

The former company-level option "Wait time before the bot responds (milliseconds)" has been removed. It was a fixed delay counted from each message rather than a real trailing window, and it did not survive a service restart. Configure the window per channel instead, as described above.

Last updated on
On this page