The auto responder is a separate AI feature from the chatbot. Where the chatbot answers visitors live, the auto responder posts an AI reply directly into a ticket thread – but only when a real agent has not already answered and the answer is good enough to ship.
The settings
Under HelpWP -> Settings -> AI -> Auto Responder:
| Setting | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Enable auto responder | Master on/off. |
| Delay | How long to wait before posting. A number plus a unit (minute, hour, or day). |
| Threshold (%) | Minimum relevance score (0-100) the RAG model must return for the answer to be posted. |
| Comment author name | The name that appears on the bot’s reply. Defaults to Support Bot. |
| Change ticket status to “In progress” after bot reply | Whether the bot’s reply auto-flips the ticket status (off by default). |
Click Save Changes and the responder is live.
How a single reply happens
- A new ticket is created, or a client posts a follow-up comment.
- HelpWP schedules a single WP-Cron job for
now + delay. Only one job per ticket exists at a time. - When the cron job fires, HelpWP checks: is the ticket terminal (resolved, closed, cancelled)? Has anyone replied since we scheduled? If yes, abort silently.
- Otherwise, the plugin sends the ticket title, client name and email, order reference, product terms, urgency, and the full client / agent transcript to
POST /wp-json/helpwp-rag/v1/respond. - The RAG service returns an answer plus a relevance score (0-100).
- If the score is below the threshold, abort silently. Log the abort.
- Otherwise, post the answer as a comment under the configured author name.
Cancellations
The pending bot job is cancelled the moment any of these happen:
- An agent posts a reply.
- The ticket moves to Resolved, Closed, or Cancelled.
- A client posts another reply (the timer restarts so the bot has a chance to use the latest message as context).
This is what “human-first” means: a human reply always wins; the bot only speaks into a vacuum.
Why the threshold matters
The threshold is the difference between a useful auto-reply and a hallucinated one. At 70% (the default) the bot only answers when the retrieved doc chunks are clearly on-topic. Raising it to 85% makes the bot more conservative – more tickets pass through to humans, but the auto-replies that do go out are higher quality. Lower than 50% is rarely a good idea.
Reading the logs
Every call (replied, aborted-low-score, aborted-already-replied, error) is logged on the RAG side with the relevance score and abort reason. Open HelpWP -> Settings -> AI -> Auto Responder Logs to inspect them.
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