Save drafts, publish changes, and restore versions of your AI agent

Drafts and versions let you change a Chatbase AI agent without affecting customers until the change is ready. Changes you save to instructions, Actions, Procedures, and channel settings go into a draft, and your customers keep talking to the live AI agent on every channel until you publish. Every publish is saved as a version, so you can see what changed, compare versions, and restore an earlier setup.

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Save and publish

Changes you make on a page such as Instructions, Actions, Procedures, or a channel’s settings go into your draft. Nothing changes for your customers yet. The Playground always uses your draft, so you can try a change before anyone else sees it. Your chat widget, Help Page, the Playground’s preview link, and every other channel keep using the live agent. When the draft is ready, click Publish in the top-right corner. A dot on Publish means your draft has changes that aren’t live yet. Publish appears on pages whose changes go into the draft. Pages whose changes go live right away, or that don’t change your AI agent, don’t show it. These include Backstage, Data Sources, Guardrails, Missions, Tests, Outbound, Integrations, and Settings. The Publish window shows everything your draft changes compared with what’s live now, grouped by area: Agent, Channels, Actions, Widgets, and Procedures. In text such as instructions, only the words that changed are highlighted. Add an optional description, then click Publish. The change goes live immediately and is saved as a new version. The arrow next to Publish opens more options:

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Settings that go live right away

Some settings aren’t part of the draft. They take effect as soon as you save them, and restoring a version never changes them:

• Data Sources and training
• Connections to other apps and channels, such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Slack, and Zendesk
• Turning a channel on or off
• Security settings, such as allowed domains, rate limits, and blocked senders
• Uploaded images, such as logos, avatars, and Widget images
• The voice pronunciation dictionary

When a page has both kinds of setting, Chatbase lists the ones that will go live right away before it saves.

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When to publish and when to keep drafting

The draft lets you group related changes and publish them together. As a rule of thumb:

• Keep drafting while a change is only partly done. For example, a new returns Procedure that also needs an Action and an instructions update should go live as one version, not three.
• Publish once you’ve tried the change in the Playground and it behaves the way you want. Tests run on the published AI agent, so for changes that affect important conversations, run your Tests right after publishing and compare the pass rate with the last run.
• Commit version to keep a setup you might publish later, such as a seasonal one, and Discard changes to drop an experiment that didn’t work.

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Example: rolling out a new return policy

A team is extending its return window from 30 to 45 days.

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Version history

Open the arrow next to Publish and click Version history. Each version shows:

• Its number and description
• When it was saved and who saved it
• The areas it changed
• Live on the version your customers are using now, and Committed on versions that were committed but never published

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See what a version changed

Click a version to open its changes. Use Compare to to switch between:

• Previous: what this version changed compared with the version before it.
• Live: what would change if you restored this version now.

The icon at the top right of each change opens the page where that setting lives. For an Action that still exists, it opens that Action.

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Restore a version

Open the version and click Restore, then confirm. Restoring:

• Makes that setup live immediately.
• Saves it as a new version at the top of the history. Older versions stay where they are.
• Discards any unpublished changes in your draft.
• Keeps the restored version’s description, or names it “Restored from” followed by the version number.

Your current plan and compliance settings still apply. If part of the old version isn’t allowed anymore, for example a model your plan doesn’t include or more enabled Actions than your plan allows, Chatbase adjusts it and lists what didn’t apply as saved. Widget images aren’t restored. If the newest version is a committed one that was never published, the button reads Publish instead of Restore.

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Changes made outside the dashboard

• API: updates through the Chatbase API go live immediately, without a draft, and appear in version history a minute or two later. They don’t change your draft.
• Backstage: changes Backstage makes go into your draft, like your own. Backstage can also list your versions, show what restoring one would change, and restore it after you approve.

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Frequently asked questions