Chatbot flows in the visual builder
The flow builder lets you design a full conversation. Available blocks include:
- Send a message, with or without media.
- Ask a question and wait for the answer — with a timeout branch, so someone who never replies gets a reminder instead of being forgotten.
- Buttons and quick replies, each opening its own branch.
- A card carousel (Instagram and Facebook).
- Delay: wait seconds, minutes, hours or days (decimals work: 1.5 hours), a random time between two values so replies don't look automated, or until a date — a fixed one, or one saved in a field or an answer, such as the day before an appointment. A delay can also be limited to some days and hours, so nothing goes out at 3 a.m.
- Conditions: branch on the person's last answer, their tags and custom fields, the network, the day and time, or whether they have already been through this automation. Each branch can combine several rules.
- Whether the person follows you (Instagram).
- Add or remove tags, save or clear a custom field, capture an email, and enrol the contact in a sequence or take them out of one.
- Book an appointment with buttons (service → day → time → details), without AI. See "Appointments".
- Ask the AI to answer freely using your knowledge base.
- Hand the conversation to a human.
- Team: notify your team (the conversation owner, a person or a team), change the conversation's status in the inbox, or pause the bot for this contact — without sending the person anything.
- HTTP request: call Zapier, Make, a webhook or your own API, and save values from the answer to use later in the flow.
- Go to another automation: jump to another flow and continue there, in the same conversation. Automations whose trigger is "Only from another automation" exist to be reached this way.
- A/B split, to alternate between two branches and compare results.
- Random split, to send people down 2 to 6 paths by weight (optionally always the same path for the same person). It doesn't measure results: for that, use the A/B split.
Texts can carry variables, such as {{first_name}}, a contact field or a question's answer, with a fallback in case it's empty: {{first_name|there}}.
On the trigger, Only once per person makes sure someone who already went through the automation doesn't get it again if they repeat the keyword or comment again. On comment automations you choose whether that counts across the whole automation or per post.
The full list of blocks, with every field, is in "Automation nodes and triggers".
Step by step
- Go to Automations > "My automations".
- Create a flow and choose the trigger (a comment, a DM, a keyword, a story reply).
- Drag blocks onto the canvas and connect them.
- Save and activate the flow.
Quick templates: the "Templates" tab has ready-made automations you can set up by filling in a short form, without touching the builder.
Vary with AI
When the same message goes out to a lot of people, it starts to look like what it is: an automated message. Under the text of every block that sends something (message, buttons, question, media, public reply…) there is a check, Vary with AI. When you save, Ignix writes fifteen versions of that message — same meaning, same tone, same language, with links, codes and numbers kept exactly as they are, and never longer — and each person gets a different one, picked at random alongside yours. There is nothing to review: the versions aren't shown, and if you edit the text they are discarded and written again.
It needs an AI add-on in the workspace (the Inferno plan or the AI add-on). If you drop it later, the versions already written keep working; new ones just stop being generated.
Media in a DM
What travels, and how, depends on the network. On Instagram and Facebook a message with buttons is a template, and a template only carries an image. So each kind of file takes the route that looks best in the chat:
| What you attach | How it arrives on Instagram and Facebook |
|---|---|
| Image | Inside the message, above the buttons |
| Video | As its own message right before the buttons — it plays in the chat |
| Audio | As its own voice message |
| Document | As a link button you name, pointing at your file |
Documents can be PDF, Word, Excel, CSV or ZIP, up to 200 MB, and they live on our own domain — you do not have to paste a Drive or Dropbox link into a DM and hope people trust it. Name the button ("Download the guide") and we fill in the link. Its taps are counted like any other button in the flow.
On WhatsApp and Telegram the media travels alongside the buttons, so nothing changes there.
Two limits that Instagram enforces quietly, without an error:
- Audio must be AAC, M4A, WAV or MP4. MP3, OGG and WebM are dropped — a recording made in Chrome or on Android is WebM, while Safari records MP4.
- A video attached to a DM cannot exceed 25 MB.
The builder warns you about both before you send.