Silent bot: working without talking to the contact

Overview

The interaction mode answers a single question: does this bot talk to the contact?

There are two modes:

• Talks to the contact (default) — the bot works as usual: it reads, reasons, uses its tools and replies to the contact on the channel.
• Silent — the bot sends the contact nothing. It keeps reading the conversation, reasoning and using the tools you enabled, but everything it produces becomes a private note for the team. A person is the one who answers the customer.

Do not confuse this with autonomy. Autonomy is how much the bot decides on its own. Interaction mode is whether what it produces reaches the contact. They are independent: a bot can be silent and still run on autopilot to act behind the scenes.

Silent is not "a bot that feels less like talking" — it is structurally unable to send. The contact-facing tools are never handed to the model, and if the model invents one of their names, execution is refused. The lock exists in both places on purpose: a lock only the model respects is not a lock.

Prerequisites

• Maestro enabled and a configured bot.
• Administrator permission to change the bot's configuration.
• A human team working the inbox — in silent mode nobody answers the contact until a person does.

Step by step

1. Open the bot's configuration.
2. Go to Interaction mode (right below Autonomy).
3. Choose Silent — private notes only.
4. Read the warning that appears: it states exactly what stops happening.
5. Save. From then on, that bot sends the contact nothing.

To reverse it, choose Talks to the contact and save — the bot resumes immediately, with every other setting intact.

Settings & options

What keeps working in silent mode

• Reading the conversation, summary and memory.
• Internal tools: CRM, calendar, catalog, knowledge base, database, web search, labelling, creating tasks, recording contact attributes.
• Private notes — this is how the bot's work reaches the team.
• Autonomy and human approval still govern the actions it performs.

What stops happening

• No message to the contact, on any channel.
• No "typing…" indicator — announcing typing would promise a message that provably cannot arrive.
• No read receipts. This is where silent is stricter than Copilot: an observing bot stamping every inbound message as read the moment it lands takes the receipt out of the human agent's hands and manufactures the worst possible reading for a customer — seen, and ignored.

Silent vs Copilot

Both stop the bot from sending on its own, by different routes:

Pick Copilot when you want to speed up the human reply. Pick Silent when you want the bot working alongside a team that owns the conversation.

Use cases

• Audit and quality — the bot follows conversations and leaves notes about risk, promises made and open items, without ever surfacing to the customer.
• Quiet enrichment — it queries the CRM and the knowledge base, records contact attributes and labels the conversation while the human agent talks.
• Risk-free pilot — run the bot silent on a real inbox for a few days and read the notes to judge its quality before letting it speak.
• Sensitive channel — legal, collections or healthcare, where the answer to the customer is always human but the preparation can be automatic.

Tips, limits & best practices

• Silent is per bot, not per conversation: it applies to every inbox that bot serves.
• If the bot goes silent and nobody is working the inbox, the contact gets no answer at all. Confirm someone is on the other side.
• Use silent as a trust ladder: Silent → Copilot → Hybrid → Autopilot.
• Tools that act (create a deal, book, charge) keep acting. If you want observation only, review the enabled tools as well.
• An unknown value in the field (say, from an API edit) is read as Talks to the contact: if this setting fails, it fails towards continuing to serve.

Troubleshooting

• "The bot stopped replying out of nowhere" — check the Interaction mode. If it is Silent, that is the expected behaviour.
• "Notes appear but the customer receives nothing" — that is exactly silent mode working. Switch to Talks to the contact if you want customer replies.
• "The customer says the message was seen and ignored" — in silent mode the bot does not mark as read; check whether the receipt came from an agent's app.
• "I asked the bot to send a message and it refused" — in silent mode the sending tools do not exist for it, and execution is refused even if the model tries.
• "I want silence in this conversation only" — use Pause the bot on that conversation; the interaction mode covers the whole bot.

See also

• What Maestro AI and the Account Brain are
• Bot autonomy modes and human approval (HITL)
• Generative copilot: propose, confirm and execute
• Maestro tools by module
• Where each bot is used