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What is Sidekick?

Sidekick is the conversation-intelligence layer that runs over every conversation. For agents, it's a slide-out panel with summaries, suggested responses, and matching knowledge. For the system, it runs background workers that auto-tag conversations and extract structured data into custom fields.

5 min read

What is Sidekick?

Sidekick is the conversation-intelligence layer that runs over every conversation in Atender. It reads what’s being said in real time, understands it, and routes that understanding to whoever — or whatever — is on the other end. For human agents, Sidekick shows up as a slide-out panel with summaries, suggestions, and matching knowledge. For the system, it works in the background — tagging conversations, detecting structured data, populating custom fields.

Sidekick assists. Agent Stacks act. Agent Stacks handle conversations autonomously; Sidekick understands every conversation and surfaces that understanding wherever it’s useful — to the agent in the panel, to the system in the background, and increasingly to Agent Stacks themselves.

Three kinds of understanding

Sidekick reads the conversation and extracts three kinds of understanding. Only entity detection runs as a background worker; the topic summary and the pattern matching are computed when an agent opens the conversation, then cached until the next customer message arrives.

  • Topic — What the customer is asking about, what’s already been tried — Conversation Summary module in the panel
  • Entities — Structured data inside messages — IBANs, phone numbers, domains, and anything a custom regex rule matches — Detected Insights module + written to the rule’s mapped custom field
  • Patterns — Cross-conversation relationships — incident matches, multiple open conversations from the same contact — Incident hint card above the panel; a chip in the conversation header for the duplicate-conversation case

That understanding is the same regardless of who’s handling the conversation. What changes is how it’s used.

For agents — the panel

When an agent opens a conversation, Sidekick appears as a slide-out panel containing a stack of modules. Each module shows a different kind of help: a quick summary, a suggested response, matching Knowledge Base articles, internal Handbook procedures, relevant links.

Modules are configurable per tenant — enable, disable, reorder via drag-and-drop in Settings → Sidekick → Panel Layout. See the panel modules reference for what each module does.

For agents — the hint card

One contextual card can pop above the modules when something material is happening:

When the same contact has other open conversations, that is flagged outside Sidekick: a chip in the conversation header reads “N other active conversations” and opens the Previous conversations panel when clicked.

For the system — background workers

Most of what Sidekick does is invisible. Two background workers run on every conversation regardless of whether a human is reading the panel:

  1. Detection rules — pattern-matching that extracts structured data (IBANs, phone numbers, domains, or anything a custom regex you write matches) from customer messages and writes it to the rule’s mapped custom field. Per rule, you can also enable scanning of internal notes and the conversation subject. See Detection rule types and Create a detection rule for scan toggles and the subject ride-along limitation.
  2. Auto-tagging — shortlists tags by semantic similarity to their names and descriptions, then has an LLM pick which of those actually apply. Recorded and transcribed phone calls can also be auto-tagged after transcription completes. Off by default — opt tags in via Tag Management and enable the global toggle in Settings → Sidekick.

Incident discovery is not a background worker: the match runs on demand when an agent opens the conversation, against the latest customer message. It is toggleable in settings.

What you tune

Sidekick’s behaviour is controlled from Settings → Sidekick, organized into four tabs:

  • General — incident discovery toggle, inline-highlight toggle, auto-save toggle, confidence threshold.
  • Panel Layout — module ordering and visibility.
  • Detection Rules — create, edit, reorder, test rules. Map to custom fields.
  • Auto-Tagging — enable the worker, set the max-candidates cap, and control whether newly transcribed phone calls are tagged with the Tag phone calls toggle under the AI Auto-Tagging card. The phone-call toggle defaults on and only affects calls transcribed after it is enabled, not historical transcripts.

The master switch (Enable Sidekick) is not on a tab — it sits in the header card above the tab strip, so it is visible from all four tabs. Turning it off greys out and locks every other setting.

Where to start

Tags

Ai FeaturesGetting StartedConcept
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