Questions
Questions we get asked.
From what RAG is to how answers are kept to your own content, where your data lives and how personal data is handled.
The basics
What is Syntalyze?
A customer engagement platform. A chat on your website is the front door: it answers from your own content, and on Professional it also does the work behind the request, such as a change of address, a bill query or a repair booking, passing each job to the right team or supplier and following it through. Behind it sit the reports that show what customers ask, what it costs and where they give up.
Is it a chatbot?
It includes one, but a chatbot answers a question and stops. Syntalyze follows each answer with the next step and can finish the job: verify the customer, read their account, raise the case, book the engineer and tell the customer when it is done.
What do I need to get started?
Your website address. Syntalyze reads your pages, and you can add a returns policy in Word, product sheets in PDF or a spreadsheet such as a store list. Paste a short snippet onto your site and the chat is live, in your colours. No developer is needed, and there is a 14-day free trial.
Can it be used internally, for staff?
Yes. The same knowledgebase can hold internal material such as HR rules or process guides, and agents in your contact centre see the same guidance on their desktop, so the phone and the chat give the same answer.
How long does it take to set up?
The chat can be live the same afternoon: sign up, give it your website address and paste the snippet onto your site. Journeys such as a change of address are added when you are ready, each built from a short description and reviewed by you before it is published.
Will it replace my contact centre agents?
It takes the routine requests, at any hour, so your people get the conversations that need a person, with the details already gathered. Agents can also use the same guidance on their own desktop, and both are measured on the same handling time and satisfaction.
Who makes Syntalyze?
MG12 Design, based in Bristol. Enterprise plans are sold and supported by our partner KhanyaTech.
AI, RAG and machine learning
Can AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude use my Syntalyze assistant?
Yes, on Professional and Enterprise. Switch on the AI agents endpoint in Settings and any AI assistant that accepts MCP connectors can use your assistant: it answers from your content, finds your products, troubleshoots, runs the journeys you switch on and hands the customer to your team. It cannot take payment, reaches an account only through a journey’s own identity check, and each AI agent conversation counts towards your plan like a chat on your website.
What is RAG?
Retrieval-augmented generation. Instead of answering from whatever a language model learned in training, the system first retrieves the passages from your own content that best match the question, then has the model write the answer from those passages. The model supplies the language; your content supplies the facts.
What is the difference between AI, machine learning and a large language model?
Machine learning is software that learns patterns from data rather than following hand-written rules. A large language model is a kind of machine learning trained on a great deal of text, which makes it good at reading and writing language. "AI" is the everyday name for both. Syntalyze uses language models to understand questions, write answers from your content, translate, and build journeys from a plain-English brief.
Which language models does it use?
OpenAI's models, through OpenAI's API. OpenAI does not use data sent through its API to train or improve its models. The full terms are on the hosting page of our buyer's pack.
Is it trained on my data?
No model is trained on your data, by us or by OpenAI. Your content is indexed so that the right passages can be found for each question, and it stays yours: change or delete it and the answers change with it.
Does it learn from conversations?
Not by changing itself without you. It shows you what customers ask, which questions it could not answer, and how each journey ends. You decide what to add or change, and the answers follow from the content you approve.
Can I control what it says?
Yes. It answers from the content you give it, and you can write or edit an article for any question and it answers from it straight away. Articles and walkthrough steps the AI drafts for you are drafts until you approve them, and you can read every conversation in the client portal.
Accuracy and hallucinations
How does it stop hallucinations?
By keeping the model to your content. Every fact it states about your company, products, prices, policies or stores must come from the passages retrieved from your knowledgebase; general knowledge may only be used to understand the question, such as working out which of your stores is nearest to a town. If nothing relevant is found, it says it cannot help with that rather than guessing, and it will not write content your knowledge does not support. Where one missing detail, such as the model of phone, would find the right answer, it asks for it.
Can you guarantee it never gets anything wrong?
No one can honestly guarantee that of any language model, and we do not. What we can do is take the model out of the places where a wrong answer matters most. Step-by-step guides are shown exactly as written, not rewritten by the model. Account details, balances and repair statuses are read live from your systems, not generated. Transactions follow the steps you designed and approved. The model writes the wording around them.
What happens when it does not know the answer?
It says so briefly and invites another question, and the question is counted on your dashboard as a gap. You can write an article for it, and Syntalyze answers from it straight away. Where a person is needed, the conversation hands to an agent with what has been gathered so far.
Can I see where an answer came from?
Answers are followed by actions drawn from the content that was used, such as reading the full guide or opening the product page, so the customer can check the source. In the client portal you can review every conversation.
Can it be tricked into saying something off-brand?
It is told never to write jokes, stories, poems or other content your knowledge does not support, and never to send customers to competitors. Every conversation is checked against the phrases agents must and must never say, and the AI chatbot is scored on the same terms as your human agents.
What stops it giving one customer another customer's details?
Account journeys verify the customer first, with checks you choose, such as surname and date of birth, before any record is read. The chat widget's public key can only start customer conversations, and every query is scoped to your organisation.
Plans, trial and contract
How much does it cost?
Starter is £99 a month, Intermediate £249 and Professional £499, billed monthly, with a saving of 10 to 15 percent if you pay yearly. Enterprise is priced on volume. Prices exclude local taxes, and nothing is charged per conversation. The pricing page compares every plan.
Is there a free trial?
Yes, 14 days, with no developer and no sales call needed to start.
Is there a long contract?
No. Self-serve plans can be changed or cancelled at any time from Settings; a cancelled plan runs to the end of the period you have paid for.
What happens if we reach our monthly conversation allowance?
The assistant pauses until the month turns or you move up a plan. You are never charged extra per conversation.
How is it different from other AI chatbots?
Most answer a question and stop. Syntalyze finishes the job: it verifies the customer, reads and updates their records, passes the work to the right team or supplier and follows it through, and shows you what every journey costs. The comparison page goes through it in detail.
Data security
Where is my data held?
In your own region. Your organisation's data is hosted at Amazon Web Services in the region where you are, or, where AWS has no region in your country, the nearest one. Answers are written by OpenAI's language models, which are not trained on your data. The buyer's pack lists every sub-processor and where it operates.
Is my data encrypted?
Yes. All traffic is HTTPS (TLS 1.2 or 1.3). Storage, database files and backups are encrypted at rest with AES-256, and conversation text, case details, customer records and contact details are also encrypted field by field, so a copy of the database alone does not reveal them.
Can another organisation see my data?
No. Every query is scoped to your organisation, and automated tests try to read one organisation's records from another's session on every change, failing the build if they can. The chat widget's public key can only start customer conversations; it cannot reach staff functions or other customers' records.
What does OpenAI receive?
Only what is needed for the answer: the question, the recent conversation, the passages from your knowledge that answer it, and any workflow fields an AI step is given. Your database is never sent as a whole. OpenAI keeps API requests in abuse-monitoring logs for up to 30 days and does not train on them.
Can we limit what agents and suppliers see?
Yes. Each item in your data dictionary is marked visible to agents or not, and editable by them or not. A field that is not visible is never sent to the agent desktop or the supplier portal, so an agent or a contractor sees only the customer details their job needs.
How do staff sign in?
With salted, hashed passwords, multi-factor authentication through an authenticator app, and lockout after repeated failures. You can require multi-factor authentication for all your staff, and agent desktops can sign in through your own identity provider.
Do you have a security pack I can send to IT?
Yes. The buyer's pack has the security summary, hosting and sub-processors, the accessibility statement, a data processing agreement and a DPIA template, all on the site.
Personal data and GDPR
How is personal data (PII) handled?
Personal data in conversations and customer records is encrypted field by field. Optional redaction removes email addresses, phone and card numbers, names and addresses from stored conversations. Logs record events, not personal data. Journeys collect personal details in secure forms inside the chat rather than asking customers to type them into the conversation.
Who is the controller and who is the processor?
You are the controller of your customers' data; MG12 Design, which makes Syntalyze, is your processor under a data processing agreement. The agreement and a DPIA template are in the buyer's pack.
How long is data kept?
You decide. You set one retention period for your conversations, closed cases and session records, and a daily job deletes what has passed it. Until you set one, it is kept. When a contract ends, all of your data is deleted from the live service and backups containing it expire within 35 days.
Can we handle subject access and erasure requests?
Yes. In the client portal, Settings has a Personal data requests screen where your administrators find everything held about a person by email, phone or reference, export it as a file, or erase it. Agents on the agent desktop cannot, and every export and erasure is logged with who carried it out.
What if there is a breach?
We tell you within 48 hours of becoming aware of a personal data breach affecting your data, with what we know and what we are doing, so you can meet your own duties to the ICO and the people affected.
Using it day to day
Does it work in other languages?
Yes. A customer who writes in another language is answered in it, with content retrieved in that language rather than machine-translated on the way to the screen. Names of buttons on a customer's screen are left exactly as their device shows them.
Is the chat accessible?
The chat widget meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2, level AA. The accessibility statement in the buyer's pack says how it was tested.
Can it hand over to a person?
Yes. When a journey cannot finish, or the customer asks, it hands to an agent or a supplier with the conversation already summarised and the details gathered, so nobody asks the customer to start again. With an agent that is live chat, and it is part of the agent desktop: the chat arrives in their queue with its history, they reply from the desktop, and they can end the chat or send the customer back into the journey.
Does it connect to our systems?
Yes, through standard APIs: journeys read and update records in your CRM, billing or job systems as they go. Until a connection exists, Syntalyze raises a case to the right team with everything already gathered.
What automation can I do if I don't have the APIs?
Plenty. A journey captures everything the customer tells you in the chat, as fields rather than a transcript, applies your business rules to it, and sends the case to the right team with all of it attached. The team is then guided through your process step by step on the agent desktop, so nobody needs training on each process, and the case can be handed on to another team or to a supplier, who works it in their own portal. When an API becomes available, the same journey can call it instead.
Which channels does it cover?
Web chat on your site, the agent desktop in your contact centre, an API for your own app or assistant, voice prompts for your phone line, proactive emails sent before the customer asks, and WhatsApp on your own WhatsApp Business number once you connect it. For WhatsApp you need a WhatsApp Business Platform account with Meta, a verified business and a number not already used on WhatsApp; messages sent outside WhatsApp's 24-hour reply window use templates Meta approves, and Meta charges for those. One library serves all of them, so a change reaches every channel at once.
Does it work with Shopify, WordPress or our own site?
Yes. It works on any site where you can paste a short snippet, and there is a step-by-step guide for Shopify.
Can it look and sound like our brand?
Yes. The chat appears in your colours, with its own name and welcome message, and articles drafted for you are written in your voice.
How do we keep it up to date?
Have it read your website again whenever your pages change, add or replace documents, or edit an article in the client portal. Changes are used in answers straight away.
Is it available out of hours?
Yes, 24 hours a day, every day. A repair reported at 2am is logged and passed on without waiting for the office to open.
What will the reports show us?
What customers ask about most, what it could not answer, how each journey ends, and the handling time, cost and satisfaction behind each one, so you can see where the money and the goodwill go. Agent compliance and performance too: every conversation checked against your script and outcomes, and each agent, human or AI, scored on compliance, handling time and satisfaction. You can build and save your own reports, and ask questions of customer conversations and agent responses in plain English, such as "why are customers unhappy with deliveries?"
Ask it yourself.
Put Syntalyze on a test page with your own content and ask it the questions your customers ask. Fourteen days free.