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Capabilities are the switches on the agent page that give the agent tools and behaviours beyond answering from its instructions and knowledge. They live on three tabs: Instructions (How it replies), Actions (Selling and orders, Follow-ups, Safety) and Handoff. Like every other agent setting, a change is saved as a draft and reaches customers’ conversations when you publish.
The two follow-up switches, Close resolved chats and Follow up when customers go quiet, are the exception: Popcorn’s background checks read the settings you last saved, so changes to those two switches and their timings apply as soon as you click Save and review, without waiting for Publish changes.
Check replies before sending has its own page: Check replies before sending. Alerts are covered in Connect knowledge, tools, channels and notifications.

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Handoff tab

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Hand over to your team

“Passes the chat to a person when the customer asks or your rule applies.” With it on, the agent has a tool to stop answering and pass the conversation to your team. It uses the tool when the customer asks for a person, when the knowledge base tells it to forward something, or when your instructions say so.
  • Tick Add your own handover rules to write your own triggers under When to hand over, for example “when a customer asks for a refund”. The text is attached to the handover tool itself.
  • If you use conversation tags (Settings → Conversation tags), the agent picks the tag that best describes the reason and applies it to the conversation.
  • Once a chat is handed over, the agent stops replying there until someone hands it back.
What happens on handover:
  1. The conversation leaves the AI and appears in Unassigned, which also counts in the Needs you folder of the Inbox, with a marker showing where the AI stopped and your team took over.
  2. The customer gets a short confirmation in their language. If that message cannot be generated, the fallback is “One moment — let me get a team member to help you with this.” with its Arabic equivalent.
  3. Slack and email alerts are sent if you switched them on under Alerts, and your team gets an in-app notification titled Conversation Handover with the reason and a link to the conversation.
Hand over to your team after the last retry, under Check replies before sending, depends on this switch. Turning Hand over to your team off while it is on shows Handing over after the last retry is off too and switches that option off.

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Actions tab

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Safety

Block spam and off-topic chats — “Stops the agent replying to spam, fraud and attempts to pull it off topic.” The agent flags messages that try to change its behaviour, hijack its instructions, or are spam, fraud, or off-topic, and refuses to answer them instead of replying.
  • Flags are counted per conversation. On the third flagged message, the conversation is handed over to your team exactly like a handover: it moves to Unassigned and Needs you, notifications go out, and the count resets.
  • It has no settings of its own. If legitimate customers are being refused, review the conversations it handed over in Needs you before deciding whether to keep it on.
Let customers opt out — “Customers who ask to stop get no more campaign messages.” When a customer tells the agent they no longer want messages, the agent marks them as unsubscribed. Unsubscribed customers are excluded from campaign audiences (see Customers). The agent does not stop replying to the customer’s own messages.

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Selling and orders

These switches need a connected store (Shopify, Salla or Zid; see Integrations). Without one, the tools are created for Shopify by default and fail when the agent calls them. Recommend products — “Suggests products from your catalog.” Gives the agent a catalog search and a way to send product cards. The agent searches by keywords or by a product link the customer shares, then sends the matching products as cards instead of describing them in text. Customers can also send a photo of a product; the agent searches by image and asks the customer to confirm the match. When this switch is on, a Manage rules button appears beside it. Rules decide which products to show first or exclusively for a given request; product weights (Boost, Normal, Hide) shape the results too. See Recommendation rules and Product catalog. Take orders in chat — “Lets the agent place orders for customers.” The agent can take an order inside the conversation:
  1. Build a cart from the products it recommended, and add the product’s custom options if it has any (required options must be chosen before ordering).
  2. Collect the delivery address through a form (on WhatsApp, a form the customer fills in; Saudi customers can give their national address short code and the agent resolves it to a full address).
  3. Prepare the order with the shipping and payment methods you set under Settings → Shipping and Settings → Payment, then send the customer a confirmation button. The order is only created in your store after the customer taps that button; a typed “yes” is not enough.
If your store has no payment method turned on, the agent does not create the order: it tells the customer your team will confirm how they can pay, and hands the conversation over. If a customer asks to pay with a method you have turned off, the order is refused. Orders created this way appear under Orders and link back to the conversation. See Orders and Shipping and payment. Track orders — “Answers where an order is.” Lets the agent look up the status of the customer’s orders. The customer’s phone number is used automatically, so a customer can simply ask “where is my order?”; if they give an order number, it is checked against the phone number. On Shopify, the agent asks for the email used at checkout only if the phone number does not match. Send images in chat — “Lets the agent send images, like product photos.” Onboarding switches this on for your first agent.

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Follow-ups

Close resolved chats — “Closes a chat the agent has resolved once the customer goes quiet.” Popcorn closes conversations the agent has finished with, so the Inbox only shows what is still open.
  • Close after (hours): how long a conversation must be quiet before it is closed, counted from the last message in the chat. Enter at least 1; new agents start at 24.
  • A conversation on one of the agent’s WhatsApp numbers is closed when it is assigned to the AI, the last message came from the agent or your team (never when the customer wrote last, since a chat never closes while the customer is waiting on a reply), it is not snoozed, and no handover is pending. The check runs every 30 minutes.
  • The close is recorded in the conversation’s activity history in the Inbox. If the customer writes again, a new conversation starts.
  • It cannot be switched off while Follow up when customers go quiet is on: the switch is locked and reads Turn off follow-ups first.
Onboarding switches this on with a 24-hour window. Follow up when customers go quiet — “Sends a message when a customer stops replying before the chat is resolved.” When a customer stops replying, the agent writes a follow-up that continues the conversation: it rephrases an unanswered question, suggests the next step, or checks whether the answer helped. It never repeats its previous message. How it runs:
  • Follow-ups go out on WhatsApp only, every 15 minutes, to conversations assigned to the AI on the agent’s numbers that had a message in the last 24 hours. Once a conversation has been quiet for more than 24 hours, no more follow-ups are sent, so the waits add up to less than a day in practice.
  • No follow-up is sent if the last message was a template, failed to deliver, or if you replied to the customer from the WhatsApp Business app in the last 24 hours.
  • It requires Close resolved chats: while that is off the switch is locked and reads Turn on closing resolved chats first. The Close after (hours) value must also be longer than your longest follow-up wait, or the page shows Enter more than N hours, so your last follow-up can send first.
Onboarding switches this on with one follow-up after 1 hour.

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Instructions tab: How it replies

Share customer details with the agent — “Gives the agent details like the customer’s phone number.” The agent is told the customer’s phone number, so it can quote it back or use it in tools. The customer’s name and last delivery address are given to the agent regardless of this switch. Onboarding switches this on. Split long replies — “Sends a long reply as a few shorter messages, at no extra cost.” A reply that contains line breaks is sent as several consecutive messages, one per line, instead of one long message. It has no effect on replies written as a single paragraph. Delay replies — “Waits a few seconds before replying, like a person typing.” Before each reply, the agent waits a random number of seconds within the range you set with Reply delay, in seconds (1 to 60; new agents start at 14 to 34). On WhatsApp the customer’s message shows as read and “typing…” appears through the wait, so the pause looks like someone writing. Leave it off if response time matters more than the human feel. Check replies before sending — “Scores each reply and tries again when it falls below your target.” See Check replies before sending.

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Quick reference

On the Create agent page the How it replies switches, including Send images in chat, are on the Actions tab.