Using GATE
Chatting with your bot
Most of your time with a bot is spent in a plain conversation.
You type a message, the bot replies.
But your bot can do more than write back paragraphs: when it has a number, a health state, a table, a before-and-after, or a picture to show you, it can drop a rich visual block right into the chat instead of describing it in prose.
This page covers what you'll see day to day.
Ordinary replies
A reply is a normal chat message. The bot answers in plain language, asks follow-up questions, and keeps the thread going. Each conversation is a session — it remembers what you've discussed, so you can refer back to earlier messages without repeating yourself.
Rich cards (chips)
When a bot has structured data, it can show a chip — a typed visual card rendered inline in the chat (the full catalog lives in the chip types reference). These are the five display chips a bot authors by hand:
| Chip | What you'll see |
|---|---|
| Stat card | A single number with a label — for example a revenue figure or a count — often with a small up/down/flat delta showing the change. |
| Status pill | A colored pill showing a health state: green for OK, amber for a warning, red for an alert, grey when the state is unknown. |
| Table | Columns and rows of data, the same shape repeated per row. A table cell can itself be a colored status. An empty table simply shows no rows rather than looking broken. |
| Diff | A before-and-after view shown as a unified diff — additions in green, deletions in red. Useful when the bot proposes an edit or shows what changed. |
| Image | A screenshot, chart, or photo shown inline, optionally with a caption. |
Beyond these five, the chat has further card types the platform produces for richer moments — progress bars, charts, forms, action buttons, and embedded browser views among them.
A chip is its own message — when the bot sends one, that reply is the card. A failed card never breaks the conversation: if a card fails to render you'll see a plain-text fallback sentence describing what it would have shown, and if the card itself was malformed you'll see its raw text instead.
A status pill never defaults to green. If the bot doesn't actually know a state, it shows grey ("unknown"), not a falsely reassuring OK.
Images and screenshots
Your bot can show you pictures directly in the chat — a screenshot it captured, a chart it generated, a photo. These appear inline, the same way the image chip does, and an image can carry a caption to explain what you're looking at. Common formats (PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP, SVG) all display.
If your bot is editing a live web page for you through a visual editing channel, every screenshot it takes is posted straight into the chat automatically, so you can watch the page change as it works.
Clickable choices
When your bot hands you a decision — "which way do you want to go?" — it can end its message with a short list of clickable option buttons. Tap one and that option is sent back as your reply; you never retype it. Unlike a chip, the buttons sit at the end of a normal message, so the bot can lay out the context and trade-offs in prose first. The bot may highlight one option as its recommended default.
Organizing conversations
The chat sidebar's conversation menu is also available to the bot, so you can organize sessions in plain language instead of hunting through the UI. Ask it to rename or tag the current conversation, move it into a folder, clone or summarize it, merge related sessions, pin it for a user, mark it read, or change its notification state.
Maintenance actions such as compacting or recovering a stuck session preserve the conversation while repairing its working state. Archive and delete are separate: archive hides a session without removing its history, while delete is destructive and requires explicit confirmation.
Going deeper
Chips and images are something your bot produces for you — you don't author them yourself. If you want to know how a bot decides when to send a card and how the formats are defined, see the developer Dashboard & UI page. For how conversations are stored and remembered, see Sessions.