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Manage personas

When you test your agent, you never talk to it as a real customer. You talk to it as a persona: a Person record that lives in the sandbox, with a starting point you define. Each persona stands for someone your agent meets, such as a first-time visitor, a returning guest with an appointment coming up, or a lead who opted out.

Pick a persona in the emulator and start a conversation. The agent treats a persona exactly as it treats a customer. It reads the record, fills in what it learns, and books appointments. Beside the phone, you watch the record change. When you want to try again, perhaps after editing a Playbook, reset the persona. It's back where it started: the same details, consent and appointments, and no memory of the last conversation.

Your personas are also who your Tests talk to, and who you send an Outreach to when you want to see it before a customer does.

Personas live under Test → Personas. Working with them has five steps: cast, talk, reset, reuse and reproduce.

Cast: make a persona for each person your agent must handle

Every agent starts with three Example personas, which are yours to edit or delete:

Persona Starting point
First-time visitor Nothing known: no record, no consent on file
Returning guest Jordan Reyes, qualified, consent granted, an appointment in two days, and two earlier messages about it
Opted-out lead Sam Okafor, consent denied, so every outbound send must refuse them

New persona asks for a label (how you'll recognise it, such as Returning guest), a line about the situation it is for, and whether to start from nothing known or from a copy of another persona. It then opens the persona's page.

A persona's page is the same page as a Person's. The Starting point card comes first, and it is the part you edit, with the same editors you use for People:

  • Details and Messaging consent: the fields the persona has at the start, including your People fields and an assigned representative.
  • Upcoming appointments: appointments the persona already has, such as in 2 days at 10:00, with Dana. They are relative to the moment you reset, so the appointment is always two days away.
  • Earlier messages: the conversation so far. The agent remembers them, and the emulator shows them above a divider, but they were never sent.

Saving the starting point resets the persona to it at once. Changing only the label or the situation doesn't.

Talk: watch the record change

Talk opens the emulator with that persona selected. Beside the phone, the Record tab shows the persona's record and marks everything that has changed since the starting point: a field the agent filled in, consent it recorded, an appointment it booked, a note in its memory journal. Captured lists everything the agent would have done outside Anychat since the starting point (a booking reaching your calendar, a notification, an email, an integration call), turn by turn.

The persona's page shows the same record in full, with a dot and changed by the agent on each field that differs from the starting point. The current record is read-only: it shows what the agent did. On the Personas list, Changed sums it up, and a blank means the persona is still at its starting point.

A persona's conversation persists between sittings, and in any browser. That is what makes Returning guest worth having: you pick it up where you left it, and the agent remembers what it learned.

Reset: go back to the starting point

Reset returns the persona to its starting point: the details and consent it says, its appointments made again (anything booked since is dropped), its earlier messages, and a new conversation. Earlier conversations are kept under Test → Sandbox conversations, still labelled with the persona.

Played a conversation to a state worth coming back to? Save as starting point on the persona's page makes the current record, its appointments and the conversation so far the new starting point.

Reuse: the same personas everywhere

A Test names a persona and runs each case against a fresh copy of it, so cases never change each other or the persona you talk to in the emulator.

Point any outbound send at a persona instead of a real Person and the whole pipeline runs (message resolution, the sending guardrails for that kind of send, the send record), but the send is captured rather than delivered. It appears as the opening in that persona's conversation, where you can reply and carry it on.

Send How to point it at a persona
An Outreach Outbound in the emulator, or send it to a persona by name, or to a list of personas as a Campaign
A triggered program recipient.personaId on the trigger
A single outreach message A per-person send to the persona's id
A test link Redeem it as a persona; that consumes none of the link's uses
A follow-up It follows the captured send, like any other

This is how an opening is previewed, how an integration is accepted, and how an Outreach is rehearsed before anyone real hears from it.

Reproduce: make a persona from a real conversation

When a customer conversation went wrong, open it under Monitor → Conversations, find the message where it went wrong, and choose Make a persona from here. The new persona's starting point is a copy of that person's record, with the name replaced by the persona's and the phone number, email, last name and notes removed, and the conversation up to and including that message (the last 40 messages) as its earlier messages. You land in the emulator, ready to send the next message yourself.

The person's name, phone and email are also replaced inside the copied messages wherever Anychat finds them. That is best-effort: something the customer typed that was never on their record, such as a second phone number, is not caught. The preview shows every message before you create the persona, so read them first.

What personas never do

A persona's phone number is profile information, like every Person's, and a persona is reached only through its emulator identity, so a persona may carry a real customer's number without touching their record. Personas never appear on the People page, in segments, in send audiences, in exports, or in any count.

A real person is never in the sandbox and a persona is never live. Someone on your own team who wants to use the real agent on their own phone is doing something else: put their number on the channel's early-access list before you launch, and mark their Person record internal after launch so they stay out of your statistics.

The Agent API and the Anychat MCP server do everything the console does, including the preview of a persona made from a conversation.

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