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Guide

AI rules, memory & personality

Your knowledge base teaches the AI what to say. Rules, memory, and personality teach it how to behave — what it must always do, what it's allowed to remember, and how it should sound. Here's how each piece works and how to set it up.

The pieces at a glance

Rules
Short written instructions the AI must always follow in a channel — things like "Never promise a refund before checking the order" or "Always answer in English". Rules apply to every AI draft and every automatic reply, and you can switch any rule off without deleting it.
Personality
How the AI sounds. Pick a tone of voice (Professional, Friendly, Casual, or Playful), choose how long replies should run (Concise, Balanced, or Detailed), and decide whether the occasional emoji is welcome. Each channel can have its own personality.
Channel knowledge
Reusable question-and-answer pairs the AI can lean on — up to 500 per channel. Sonny can learn these automatically from clear answers your team sends, or you can add them by hand. Learned entries link back to the conversation they came from.
Customer details
Durable facts and preferences about an individual customer — "Prefers updates by email", "On the annual plan" — up to 20 per customer in each channel. For a verified customer, Sonny can learn one useful detail automatically from an evidence-backed message. Details are only ever used in that customer's own conversations.
Learning from your team
Sonny can learn reusable channel knowledge from a clear teammate answer and customer-specific context from a verified customer's own message. Nothing is locked in — every learned entry can be reviewed, edited, or deleted.
You stay in control
Everything the AI remembers is visible in one place. Search it, correct it, or delete it — deletions take effect immediately, and the AI stops using that information from the very next reply.

How the AI puts it together

When the AI writes a draft or answers a customer, it combines everything you've set up — in a strict order of priority, so there's never a question about what wins:

  1. 01

    Your rules

    Always apply. A rule is never outranked by anything the AI has learned or remembered.

  2. 02

    Your knowledge base

    The source of truth for facts — pricing, features, policies. If memory and the knowledge base disagree, the knowledge base wins.

  3. 03

    Channel knowledge

    Treated as helpful examples of how your team answers, never as facts that override the knowledge base.

  4. 04

    Customer details

    Used to personalise replies for that one customer — never shared between customers, and never used in the test chat.

Personality shapes the voice of every reply, but it never changes the facts — and it never outranks a rule.

Setting up rules

  1. 01

    Rules & Memory

    Go to Channels, pick your channel, open the "AI" tab, and choose "Rules & Memory". (You'll need the AI add-on or your own key active — see the AI Copilot guide.)

  2. 02

    Add a rule

    Select Add rule and write one clear instruction. Short and specific works best. You can add up to 50 rules per channel.

  3. 03

    Toggle, edit, or delete

    Each rule has a switch, so you can pause one without losing it. Edits and deletions apply to the AI's very next reply.

  4. 04

    Try it in the test chat

    The test chat on the same page follows your rules, so you can check the effect immediately — before any customer does.

Rules that work well

  • "Never promise a refund — offer to connect the customer with our team instead."
  • "Always answer in the language the customer writes in."
  • "Don't quote delivery times — link to the shipping page instead."
  • "Address customers by first name when we know it."

Setting the personality

  1. 01

    Settings

    On the same AI page, open Settings. The Personality card sits below the AI Copilot and Auto-Responder switches.

  2. 02

    Pick a tone and length

    Under Tone of voice, choose Professional, Friendly, Casual, or Playful. Under Reply length, choose Concise, Balanced, or Detailed.

  3. 03

    Decide on emoji, then save

    Turn on Emoji if a light touch fits your brand. The AI uses at most one per reply. Select Save changes to apply the voice to drafts and automatic replies.

Working with memory

  1. 01

    Memory

    In Rules & Memory, the Memory card has Channel knowledge for reusable answers and Customer details for facts about individual customers. Both are searchable.

  2. 02

    Add knowledge by hand

    Select Add knowledge to write a reusable question and answer. Select Add detail under Customer details to choose a customer and save a fact for them.

  3. 03

    Check where an answer came from

    Automatically learned channel knowledge and customer details show Source conversation so you can inspect the evidence. Channel entries added by a teammate show Added manually.

  4. 04

    Manage details from the contact page too

    Every contact's page has an "AI customer details" card showing what the AI remembers about them across your channels — with the same add, edit, and delete controls.

Privacy and control

Memory is useful precisely because it's not a black box. Here's what Sonny does — and refuses to do — with it:

  • Channel knowledge may be reused across customers, so it's the wrong place for anything private — the app reminds you of this, and Sonny's automatic learning is designed to skip customer-specific information.
  • Sonny declines to store sensitive information such as passwords, access codes, or payment details in memory — even if it appears in a conversation.
  • Customer details stay with that customer. If you merge two contacts, their details move with them.
  • Automatic customer-detail learning only runs for a verified customer. An email typed into the widget is useful context, but it is not authentication and cannot unlock memory.
  • Deleting a rule, a saved answer, or a customer detail takes effect immediately — the AI stops using it from its next reply.
  • The test chat previews your rules, knowledge, and channel memory, but never uses any real customer's details.

Related docs

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