What's new in Asks

Changing your agent used to mean editing its guidance and hoping for the best. Tests make it a check you can run. Each test is one scenario: who the customer is, what they want, and the one thing your agent must get right. When it runs, another model plays that customer and talks to your agent with your live knowledge, products, actions and model tier. A judge then grades the finished conversation against your criterion alone.

Find it at AI Agent → Tests, where it replaces Evals. Nothing real changes during a run: lookups can stay live and read-only, while bookings, saved leads and other writes are simulated. Tests run on monthly test credits, separate from your AI credits: 200 on Starter, 500 on Business and 1,000 on Premium.

October was our biggest month since launch. Each major launch has its own note; this roundup covers everything else.

• A refreshed Chat widget that opens above the launcher and straight into the conversation.
• Faster replies, with lookups running at the same time.
• Verified order lookups: an order number alone no longer unlocks order details.
• A safer Playground where actions that change data are simulated and the cart works.

Add https://api.asks.app/v1/mcp to Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor or any other MCP client, sign in, pick the workspace and approve what the assistant may do. There's no API key to create or paste. From then on you can ask the assistant to add a policy to your knowledge base, find every open conversation about late deliveries, or summarize last week's ratings, without leaving the tool you're working in.

Anything that reaches a real customer or can't be undone needs your confirmation every time. The URL, setup for each client and every connected app are under Integrations → MCP server. The MCP server and the expanded public API are on Business and Premium.

Your agent now answers on three more channels, each connected from Channels in your dashboard. Email turns the address customers already write to into a channel with one forwarding rule, and replies land in the customer's original thread. Slack brings the agent into your Slack workspace for mentions and direct messages, and lets your team work customer conversations from Slack threads. Telegram connects a bot you create in @BotFather, and the agent answers its direct messages.

As with every channel, conversations land in the same inbox, the agent answers from the same knowledge, and your team can take over at any time. All three are included on every plan, Free included.

Outbound sends an approved WhatsApp template to a list of your customers: a restock alert, an order update, a promotion. Pick customers by hand, filter them by tags or details your agent collected, or import a CSV. Each message is personalized from the customer's details, sent from your connected number now or at a time you schedule, and tracked from sent to replied.

Sending doesn't flood your inbox. When a customer replies, the campaign message and the reply land together in one conversation, answered by your agent or left for your team, as you choose per campaign. Find it under Outbound in the sidebar; it's on every paid plan.

When a customer wants a consultation, a demo or a fitting, your agent can now offer real times instead of a generic link. Connect Calendly under Integrations → Calendly, then add a Calendly action for each event type you want offered and say when to offer it. The agent reads your availability live, suggests a few options with the timezone, and links each one to your Calendly page with that time already selected.

On Calendly Standard or higher, set the action to Book in the chat: once the customer picks a time and shares their name and email, the agent books it and sends the reschedule and cancel links. Calendly actions are on every paid plan, counted separately from custom actions.

Your website surfaces used to share one settings page, with Spotlight as a mode of the widget. Each is now its own channel under Channels: the Chat widget (the launcher in the corner), Spotlight (the “Ask anything” bar) and the Chat Page (a hosted page at app.asks.app/c/your-slug). Each has its own opening message, conversation starters and wording, and its own Live switch in the page header.

The Chat widget and Spotlight share one embed snippet, so your site shows one or the other and switching needs no code change. The Chat Page is independent: it can stay live alongside either one, or on its own if you don't have a website. Your brand settings, like primary color and logo, apply to all three.

September was about the inbox: making every conversation readable, and making sure automation never gets in a waiting customer's way.

• Meta messages as they look: story replies, shared posts and reels, reactions, and WhatsApp locations and orders render as cards, with real customer names.
• Follow-ups and auto-resolve in one place, and a customer waiting on your team is never nudged or closed.
• Product search by photo against your Shopify catalog.
• Launcher icons: curated presets or your own upload, with an optional label.

The month after launch was about the basics of running Asks every day. Alongside Collect Leads and Collect Data:

• Two new plans: Free, which doesn't expire, and Enterprise, for custom limits and SAML SSO.
• Identity verification so a signed-in customer's conversations follow them across devices.
• Install guides for HTML, React, Vue, Angular, WordPress and Shopify, with live install detection.
• The dashboard in Bahasa Indonesia, and a full-screen widget on phones.

Two new tools under AI Agent. Collect Leads asks interested visitors for their contact details at the moment you describe (a pricing question, a demo request, a back-in-stock alert), with a short form under the reply on your website or conversationally on WhatsApp, Instagram and the other messaging channels. Collect Data gathers the custom fields a request needs, like an order number and a reason before a return.

Every submission is saved to the customer's profile and delivered where you work: the Leads and Collected data lists under Customers, email, and webhooks. Both are on every plan.

Spotlight replaces the launcher bubble in the corner with a floating “Ask anything” bar at the bottom center of your page. Visitors type right into it, press Enter, and the bar rises into a chat window with their question already sent and the answer streaming in. There's no home screen or menu to get through first.

The window is liquid glass: a frosted, translucent card tinted by your primary color, with replies as clean text on the glass instead of chat bubbles. Turn it on at Channels → Spotlight. It runs from the same embed snippet as the Chat widget and replaces it on your site, so there's nothing new to install.

The three channels your customers ask for most are now live for every workspace: WhatsApp Business, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. Each connects through Meta's official flows — Embedded Signup for WhatsApp, Business Login for Instagram and Pages — right from Channels in your dashboard, with nothing to host and no third-party middleman.

It's the same agent everywhere: conversations from all three land in the same inbox, escalate to your team the same way, and photos, voice notes, and documents flow in both directions. WhatsApp even supports coexistence mode — keep chatting from the WhatsApp Business app on your phone while Asks answers from the inbox.

Today Asks opens to everyone. Paste your website address and a few minutes later you're talking to an AI agent that knows your products, your policies, and your voice — ready to answer customers on your website and on the messaging apps they already use, with every conversation flowing into one team inbox.

We built Asks around one conviction: support AI should resolve, not deflect. That shapes everything in the product —

• Grounded answers. The agent answers from your knowledge and says so when it can't — it would rather hand off honestly than guess confidently.
• Humans stay in charge. Escalation is a first-class outcome, not a failure state: your business hours, your triggers, your team's inbox.
• Your brand, your words. From the widget's colors to the greeting to the sign-off, nothing ships in a voice you didn't choose.

The full story — what's in the box, what we believe, and where it's going — is in the launch note. Or skip the reading: start for free and meet your agent.