The WhatsApp Experience

Starting a conversation

When someone messages your WhatsApp number for the first time (or types "menu" at any point), they see an assistant menu — a welcome message listing your organization's companions, so they can pick who they want to talk to by replying with a number. If your organization only has one companion, this step is effectively skipped.

Once a companion is selected, that choice is remembered for the conversation, and the customer gets a greeting message before the chat continues normally. Typing "menu" again at any time reopens the picker so they can switch companions.

Talking to the companion

From there, it behaves like any other Aura conversation:

• Answers are grounded in the companion's knowledge base (RAG) rather than generic replies.
• The companion can send media — images, documents, links — as native WhatsApp attachments rather than pasted links.

Guided walkthroughs

If a companion has a published guide relevant to what the customer is asking, it can offer to start it. Once accepted, the guide runs as a step-by-step interactive flow with navigation controls (next, back, restart, exit) built into the message. If the customer goes quiet and their guide session expires, they'll see:

Session expired. Type 'guide' to restart.

When a conversation is handed to a human

If the conversation needs a person — the companion couldn't resolve it, or the customer asked for a human — a support ticket is raised behind the scenes. The companion sends one brief acknowledgment message and then goes silent on that conversation for 24 hours, so a human agent can take over without the companion talking over them. After 24 hours, automated replies resume.