Documentation

How it works, and what it will not do

Tephlo answers your customers on WhatsApp, Telegram and your own website from the material you give it. This documentation covers connecting a channel, writing a knowledge base worth answering from, and the limits the platform enforces on your behalf.

What it is

Tephlo is a multi-tenant customer-support assistant. Each workspace connects its own channels, uploads its own documents, and gets an assistant that answers from those documents and nothing else. When it cannot answer well, it says so and brings in a person from your team, carrying the whole conversation with it.

There are no decision trees to build and no scripts to maintain. What you configure is the material it answers from, what your organization is trying to achieve, and who should be alerted when a conversation needs a human.

The part worth reading first

The most valuable thing this product does is refuse to lie. Two rules sit underneath every reply, and both are enforced in code rather than requested of a language model:

  1. It answers only from your material. Retrieved passages from your knowledge base and catalog are the evidence for an answer. With no grounded evidence, it does not guess — it says it is not sure and escalates.
  2. It cannot claim an action it cannot perform. A registry in the platform lists every action the assistant may offer, resolved per conversation from real state. A reply that promises something outside that list is replaced before your customer sees it, with a message that names the limit honestly and offers a real next step instead.
It cannot take payment, place an order, add to a cart, book an appointment, or issue a certificate. No code path for any of those exists anywhere in the platform, for any workspace, and no setting creates one. Writing “checkout” as a conversation goal does not create a checkout. See what it cannot do for the full list and how the guard works.

This is a deliberate trade. An assistant that occasionally invents a purchase link closes more conversations on paper and costs you the customers who followed it. The registry exists because exactly that happened: asked to buy a product, an earlier version quoted the price again and then invented “you can order through our website or contact our sales team” — a website, a checkout and a sales desk that did not exist.

Start here

Pick the path that matches what you are doing today.

Setting up a new workspace

Quickstart

Three steps to a live assistant, plus a sandbox link you can try today.

Connecting customers to the assistant

Channels

WhatsApp Business, Telegram and the web widget — shared sandbox versus your own credentials.

Writing the material the answers come from

Knowledge

Uploading sources, what makes a knowledge base worth answering from, and the product catalog.

Understanding what customers will actually get

Conversations

Grounded answers, the capability limits enforced in code, handoff, goals per domain, and languages.

Support agents and workspace admins

The console

A tour of every screen your team works in, and who can reach which one.

Security review and procurement

Security & privacy

Tenant isolation, encrypted credentials, audit trails, consent defaults and privacy tooling.

Anyone stuck on one specific thing

FAQ

Short answers to the questions that come up during setup.

If you have not created a workspace yet, start a free workspace and then follow the quickstart. Pricing, plan limits and sales questions live on the Tephlo pricing page.

Every section

OverviewWhat the assistant is, what it refuses to do, and where to go next.
QuickstartThree steps to a live assistant, plus a sandbox link you can try today.
ChannelsWhatsApp Business, Telegram and the web widget — shared sandbox versus your own credentials.
KnowledgeUploading sources, what makes a knowledge base worth answering from, and the product catalog.
ConversationsGrounded answers, the capability limits enforced in code, handoff, goals per domain, and languages.
The consoleA tour of every screen your team works in, and who can reach which one.
Security & privacyTenant isolation, encrypted credentials, audit trails, consent defaults and privacy tooling.
FAQShort answers to the questions that come up during setup.

Not available yet

Some capabilities exist in the platform but are switched off by default and enabled per deployment as they roll out. This documentation marks them wherever they appear, and they are not part of what a new workspace gets today:

Answer reuse, response caching, escalation insights and the improvement queue Rolling outThe intelligence layer that lets approved answers be served instantly. Every part of it needs both a platform switch and your workspace’s consent, so it is inert until both are given.
Reading documents, images and voice notes a customer sends Rolling outMedia that cannot be processed gets a polite note in the customer’s own language offering a person — never silence. Location pins and contact cards are handled today.
Public web lookups Off by defaultDisabled unless a search provider is configured for the deployment. While it is off, the assistant answers questions needing live external facts with an honest “I cannot verify that online” rather than guessing.
Automatic check-back on a waiting escalation Rolling outA single honest follow-up when a customer has been waiting for a person. Business hours and handoff notices are live today.