Skip to content

Use the emulator

The emulator is a phone on screen. It renders your agent's replies the way RCS, Apple Messages for Business, WhatsApp or SMS would show them: rich cards, carousels and tappable chips where the channel supports them, numbered plain-text choices on SMS. It sends through the real rendering pipeline, so what you see is what a handset would get.

Whoever is talking in the emulator is a persona, and every conversation is in the sandbox: reads are real, writes are captured. The agent really looks up availability, really searches Knowledge and really resolves the person. The booking it would have written, the notification it would have sent and the integration it would have called are shown to you instead of performed. Nothing reaches a real customer.

Open it from the agent's Test → Emulator.

The controls

Persona. Pick who is talking from the persona menu. A persona is a Person record that lives in the sandbox, with a starting point. Each keeps its own conversation across sittings and browsers, so Returning guest stays returning, and any earlier messages from its starting point show above a divider. The menu ends with New persona… and Manage personas. Reset (the refresh icon) returns that persona to its starting point; earlier sandbox conversations are kept.

Record and Captured. Beside the phone, Record shows the persona's record with a dot on everything that changed since the starting point, refreshed after every turn. Captured lists, turn by turn, what the agent would have done outside Anychat since the starting point.

Channel look. RCS, AMB, WA and SMS switch the rendering. The reply is composed for the channel you pick, so an SMS answer is not an RCS answer with the cards stripped out. It is what the agent would have written on SMS.

Inbound or Outbound. Choose who opens the conversation, then press the send icon. Both are filled in already, so you can send without changing anything.

Mode What you set What happens
Inbound The persona's first message, "Hi" to start with The message is sent as the persona and the agent answers it, as if a customer had written first.
Outbound One of the agent's Outreaches, the first one to start with The Outreach is sent to the persona and its opening appears in the phone. The whole outbound pipeline runs: message resolution, the sending guardrails and the send record. The send is captured, not delivered.

Either way, keep the conversation going by typing in the phone. Outbound is how you rehearse an opening or see what an Outreach will actually say. The send goes out as a send you make by hand: a persona whose consent is recorded as denied, or who replied STOP, is refused, just as a real person would be. After a Reset, the same Outreach can be sent to that persona again.

Captured. The panel beside the phone (below it, in the docked panel) lists what the agent did instead of doing it for real, in order: bookings made, moved and cancelled, notifications, emails, outbound sends and custom-integration calls, each with a one-line summary. An empty panel means the agent only talked.

Where the conversation goes

Emulator conversations are kept. They are listed under Test → Sandbox conversations, with the persona's name and a Sandbox badge, and they open, explain and replay with the same tools as any other conversation. They never appear under Monitor → Conversations, never create a Person, and never count toward statistics, review, billing or any scheduled action.

Three places to put it

There is one emulator session, shown in whichever place suits what you are doing.

  • The Emulator page (Test → Emulator) shows the phone at full size with the captured panel beside it. Opening the page points the session at that agent.
  • The docked panel stays on the right while you move around the console, so you can change a Playbook and ask the same question again without leaving the page you are editing. Open or close it with ⌘⇧E (Ctrl+Shift+E on Windows and Linux), the phone button in the top bar, or Open Emulator panel in the command palette (⌘K). With the panel open, ⌘⇧E puts the cursor in the phone's message box; press it again to close. ⌘K and ⌘J work while you are typing in the phone. While the Emulator page is open the panel is hidden, because the page is already showing the phone.
  • Its own window. Open in its own window moves the phone into a separate browser window you can place anywhere, including on another screen. The conversation carries over. While the window is open, the docked slot offers Show window and Bring it back here; Dock in the window returns the phone to the console.

The panel starts on the agent you are working on. Choose a different agent from the menu on the agent name; when you then open another agent's pages, the panel stays where it is and offers a Switch to … link. The panel and the Copilot panel can be open together, side by side. Drag either panel's inner edge to resize it, or double-click the edge to reset its width.

The emulator remembers your agent, persona and channel in this browser only. Signing out clears them.

A colleague who works with the team but has no console account (a client, a reviewer, a copywriter) can talk to one agent through a standalone emulator link. They open the link, pick one of the agent's personas or make one by name, pick a channel look, and type. It is the same emulator and the same sandbox: nothing they do reaches a real customer, and their conversations appear under Sandbox conversations under that persona's name with everyone else's. Two people holding the same link share a conversation only if they pick the same persona.

Links live under Test → Emulator links.

  1. Click New link.
  2. Give it a Label so you recognize it later ("Marketing review"), and set Expires in (days): 14 by default, 90 at most.
  3. Click Create link. The url is shown, and copied to your clipboard, once. Paste it into your own message to the person you are sharing it with; it is not shown again.

The list shows each active link's label, expiry and days left. Revoke kills a link immediately for everyone holding it; there is no un-revoke. If you lose a url, revoke the link and make another.

A standalone emulator link is not a channel's early-access list. The link is a browser emulator in the sandbox; early access is who can reach the real agent on a real channel, on their own phone, before you launch it.

What's next