Inbox
The Inbox page is where you manage the Talk inbox settings, including email addresses, saved replies, teams and members, and assignment rules.
Teams and agents
You can create up to 5 teams to handle different types of conversations, such as a team for each sales and customer support.
Each agent can be a member of more than one team.
Each team has an email address that it sends from for email handoff, such as support@mybrand.com for a customer support team.
NOTE: If you are using a custom domain to send handoff emails and the custom domain cannot be found, Ortto will fallback to the default domain you set. If your default domain cannot be found, Ortto will fallback to the system default (autopilotmail.com).
Learn more about Custom domain names.
If a conversation is assigned to an agent it must also be assigned to be assigned to a team so that email handoff can be sent from the appropriate email address.
If you have created teams, conversations must be assigned to teams. When creating a team where you already have exiting conversations, you must assign the existing conversation to a team. Similarly, if you delete a team, you must transfer that team’s conversations to another team. (Where you have no teams, you are not required to assign conversations to teams.)
Create a team
At Settings > Talk widget > Teams:
- Click New team.
- Configure the team as required, including setting the team’s email address and members (agents).
- Click Add team to save the team.
Once the team is created, you can edit or delete it by clicking on the more icon and selecting the required action.
Assignment rules
Here you can set the rules that determine which teams or agents new conversations are assigned to.
To create an assignment rule:
- Click Add rule.
- Give the rule a descriptive name, e.g. "Assign high-spend customers to VIP Support".
- The Conversation opened occurs criteria is added by default and can’t be deleted, but you can add filter criteria to it.
- At Assign to, choose the team and/or agent to which the conversation will be assigned.
- Click Save to finish.
Once your rules are created, you can click and drag a rule to rearrange the priority order.
Make changes to an existing rule by clicking on it to access edit and delete functions.
New inbound conversations that don’t meet an assignment rule will be assigned to the default team you select.
If you have no teams, a new conversation will appear in the Unassigned inbox.
Within the inbox, conversations can be manually assigned or reassigned as required. Learn more about manual assignment under Inbox assignment rules.
Emails
In this section, you can configure your outgoing email (email sent from Talk), and incoming email (email sent to Talk to create a conversation).
Outgoing email
Set the From name and From email to use for agent replies sent via email, such as during email handoff. Where you have teams, add a relevant email name and address for each team.
NOTE: The From email domain must match a valid custom domain you have added in Ortto. Learn more about adding custom domains.
Incoming email
Adding an incoming email address enables you to collect and manage customer queries originating from email (in addition to collecting queries via the talk widget).
Set up your support team’s email address, for example, to have emails sent to help@mybrand.com forwarded to Ortto and created as conversations in your Talk inbox. Your support team can then manage conversations as usual from the Talk inbox.
You can set up multiple email addresses to auto-forward emails to Ortto, such as if you have a different email address for your Support and Sales teams.
To configure an incoming email address, navigate to Settings > Inbox > Emails > Incoming email.
- Click Add email.
- On the Add email address page, populate the Select email address field.
- Click Next.
- Continue the following instructions if setting up email forwarding yourself.
- Select your Email provider.
- The email address at Forward incoming mail to is the address associated with your Ortto account (instance) to which email messages are auto-forwarded.
- Once you’ve configured your inbox for email forwarding, click Send test email to check you mailbox is configured correctly.
IMPORTANT: The email domain must match a custom domain you have added in Ortto. This ensures that the domain configuration is already validated in Ortto.
NOTE: For email addresses using Google, Ortto will wait to receive confirmation code from Google confirming that the auto-forwarding has been configured correctly.
Once an email address is added, use the more icon to access a menu to disconnect or delete the email address, or resend instruction information to a developer or someone assisting you with the setup. Email addresses will have one of the following statuses:
- Default — this is the mailbox associated with your Talk inbox and cannot be edited.
- Connected — the email address is configured correctly to auto-forward email to Ortto.
- Setup — the email address is not yet configured to auto-forward email to Ortto.
Saved replies
Saved replies help your teams and members provide consistent, efficient replies to common questions.
Each saved reply can be configured to be used by a particular team (such as instructions on how to use product features for your Support team and organization updates for all teams and members).
To create a saved reply, at Settings > Inbox > Saved replies:
- Click New saved reply.
- In the New saved reply modal, choose a relevant icon and write a descriptive title.
- Write the reply, including any media, merge tags, links and emojis you want to include.
- Set the availability for the reply.
- Click Create to save the reply.
NOTE: If you set a reply availability to Just me, it will be visible to you and any users with an Admin or Manager role. Users with other roles will not be able to see your Just me replies.
When Admin or Manager users view a saved reply that is set to Just me for another user, it will show as Private.
Make changes to replies in the Saved replies list by clicking the more icon then Edit or Delete.
Once created, saved replies are accessed by agents in the Talk Inbox, when composing a conversation message. Type "/reply" in the message box or click the upload icon > Saved replies to access your saved replies. Agents can also create new saved replies from the saved replies selection modal.
AI settings
Ortto’s Talk AI makes it easier for agents to answer visitors' questions. The data you provide to the AI at Settings > Talk widget > AI settings trains the AI to suggest relevant responses that agents can use and edit when composing conversations.
Set up your AI model
To configure your AI model, navigate to Settings > Inbox > AI settings. Initially, the model will be empty and you’ll need to click Setup to get started.
On the AI settings page, click Add source to import resources such as your organization’s help documentation or marketing materials to train the AI model. You can also import from selected data sources connected to your Ortto account, such as Zendesk.
When you have finished importing content, click Save changes to exit the setup.
How the Ortto AI model works
Once your content is imported, the AI model will build an initial version (1.0), and then will automatically update every 14 days. When a new version is built and ready to use, it will be marked Live.
The model will collect data points based on all the input it receives, such as the content sources you add, saved replies you create, and what the model learns from being used by agents in conversations. Generally, each data point reflects a training source, for example, a help documentation source = 1 point, a saved reply = 1 point, and so on.
When agents use the AI suggestions to compose conversation messages, whether the AI suggestion is used verbatim or the agent edits it before sending, it trains the AI to learn and improve. These improvements are released with each new version of the AI model.
Depending on your Ortto plan, you have a number of manual updates available each month. You might want to trigger a manual update where you have added a new content source, or had a major update to your help documentation that you want the AI to ingest.
AI performance
The Performance section of your AI model gives you an indication of how useful the model has been for the Talk agents.
Performance is evaluated over a 7-day rolling window. It takes into account how many AI suggestions were:
- generated and used by agents (satisfactory), or
- generated but not used by agents (unsatisfactory).
An AI suggestion is considered "used" by being inserted into the conversation message bar.

Advanced
This section allows you to turn ON/OFF the customer satisfaction survey and add fields to your inbox search filters.
Customer satisfaction survey
Toggle ON/OFF the customer satisfaction survey that enables contacts to rate a conversation the first time it is closed.
Learn more about the customer satisfaction survey under Agent ratings in Talk inbox.
Custom search fields
In this section you can add person and organization fields that you want to use to improve the search filters in your inbox.
Click Add field to select up to 3 relevant fields, then click Save to save your selection.

Then, when you search within your inbox, you'll see your chosen fields added to the search filter options.

If you delete a field that's added in the Custom search fields list, it will be marked red and you can remove it using the trash icon. A deleted field will be automatically removed from the inbox search filter options.