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Use your Echo AI agent in your account by clicking ‘Ask Echo’ to help you with this.

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What are tools?

Tools are how your AI support agent can interact with your systems and backend in a more autonomous way. For each ticket, your AI agent will decide whether or not it needs to use a tool you give it access to, so it will only use the tool when it deems it necessary.
Tools can only be used in conjunction with a Task

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What can tools be used for?

Tools can be used for pretty much any action you would use an API for today. Examples include:
  • Looking up data that isn’t necessarily user-specific, such as property or product lookups
  • Automating cancellations
  • Automating refunds
  • Automating background checks
  • Automating customer data updates, e.g. address updates
Your AI agent will understand the ticket it is answering and decide when it needs to take action using one of these tools.

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How do tools differ from the User Data API?

The User Data API is to be used when you need to retrieve information or data about a specific user and can only be used where you have a verified user (email support ticket or authenticated live chat user). What API request methods can Actions (Tools) APIs support? Actions (Tools) can support any API request method, including:
  • POST
  • GET
  • PATCH
  • PUT
and more.

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How do I set up tools?

In your Dashboard go to Tasks & Tools > Tools (APIs) and click + New. Each tool will map to an API and needs the following details:
  • API endpoint: e.g. https://api.company.com/orders
  • Authentication headers: e.g. Authorization: Bearer <token>
  • JSON request body: include the fields your tool needs, such as "email" and "order_id"
  • Other headers (optional)
  • JSON response body: include all the information you want your AI agent to access, e.g.
There is no other specific API format expected by your AI agent, apart from the above. This makes it fairly flexible to integrate existing APIs or modify existing APIs for exposing to your AI agent. Tools are live as soon as they are added, however to be used they must be added to a Task.

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How much do tools cost?

Tool calls cost $0.02 per reply that used a tool/API call, you will only pay for responses where tool calls are made.

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How many characters can be included in a tool call response?

The maximum response size (in characters) for a tool call response is 15,000 characters. If responses exceed this size then the response will be trimmed to the first 15,000 characters before reaching the agent.