Managing topics and switching classification on

Short answer: go to Settings → Topics (under Conversations & chat). Fill the list of topics there first, and only then switch on Classify conversations by topic and question type. Without topics, every conversation lands in Not classified.

Step by step

1. Open Settings and click the Topics card.
2. Click Add topic. Give it a name, a short description and the synonyms your customers use themselves. Press Enter to add a synonym.
3. Repeat until your list covers your reality. If you don't know where to start, use Having topics suggested.
4. Switch on Classify conversations by topic and question type at the top and click Save settings.
5. If you also want your existing conversations counted, use the buttons at the bottom, see Classifying existing conversations.

Only admins can reach this screen, and it's part of the paid plans.

The description and the synonyms are not decoration

Sarrai reads the description and the synonyms again on every classification. They are the only explanation she gets about what you mean by that topic.

A topic with nothing but a name gets chosen noticeably worse than a topic with a sentence of explanation and the words your customers actually type. If conversations keep landing on the wrong topic, this is where you fix it. Correcting per conversation won't help there, because Sarrai learns nothing from it.

Two settings on the same screen

The confidence threshold sets how sure Sarrai has to be before she assigns a topic. Below that value the mention stays on Not classified and only the question type remains.

The minimum for a suggestion sets how many similar conversations without a topic it takes before Sarrai proposes a new one. See Having topics suggested.

Renaming, archiving and merging

Renaming keeps your history. All earlier mentions stay attached to that topic and appear under the new name right away, including in reports about past months.

Archiving never deletes. The topic disappears from the list used for new conversations and from the list Sarrai gets, while your old figures stay readable. Archived topics sit in their own table at the bottom, and Reactivate brings them back. Deleting for real isn't possible, and that's deliberate: otherwise published figures would change after the fact.

Merging joins two topics. The name and synonyms of the topic you merge move to the target, and the source topic gets archived. In the table of archived topics you'll then see Merged into instead of Archived only. Merging needs two active topics or more.

Merging rewrites no figures at all

This is the consequence you won't see on screen. When you merge, the existing mentions are not touched: they keep their original topic. The report only adds them to the target topic while reading.

Two pleasant things follow from that. Merging is reversible: bring the source topic back out of the archive later and its figures are simply there again. And a report about last month doesn't change retroactively, because nothing was rewritten.

Good to know

A new topic works forward, not backward. Sarrai can choose it for conversations classified after that. If you want your older conversations counted too, use Classifying existing conversations. Conversations somebody adjusted by hand stay out of range even then.

From roughly forty active topics the screen warns you. That's not a technical limit but a readability one. The report puts your topics against the six question types, and at fifty rows you won't get a pattern out of it anymore. Rather add a synonym to an existing topic than put a variant next to it. You can go past it, and then the report becomes unreadable without anything failing.

Also searched as

"set up categories for conversations", "where do I switch classification on", "rename a topic without losing figures", "merge two topics", "how many topics can I have"

See also

• How does Sarrai classify conversations by topic and question type?
• Having topics suggested
• Classifying existing conversations