Data controls

Data controls let you decide how your AI Agent remembers customer conversations and what types of links it can share. These settings help balance personalized experiences with privacy and security.

Persistence settings

AI Agents can remember a customer from one conversation to the next. AI Agents store a record of the customer, their associated data, and their chat history. This is called Customer Persistence.

But what if you don’t want your AI Agent to always remember the customers it speaks with? No problem! You can use the Customer Persistence settings to determine when your AI Agent should forget a customer.

Persistence is only evaluated on page load or refresh, not continuously. If a user keeps the chat page open without reloading—even for extended periods beyond the configured time duration—Ada will retain the conversation and variables.

Configure Customer Persistence

Here’s how to access the Customer Persistence settings for your AI Agent:

On the Ada dashboard, go to Channels > Chat, then go to the Data & privacy tab.
Under Persistence, from the drop-down menu, select your preferred Customer Persistence setting.
Click Save.

Customer Persistence settings

There are four Customer Persistence settings to select from. Each is outlined below.

Never Forget	The AI Agent never forgets the chat history and saved variables, regardless of how the customer ends the conversation. If the customer clears their browser history, the chat history is cleared as well.
Forget After Tab Close	The AI Agent forgets the chat history and saved variables if the customer closes the chat tab or window; however, the AI Agent maintains the chat history and saved variables if the customer refreshes the page or links to a new page. Each new tab behaves as a unique chat conversation. The customer’s conversation and data does not carry across tabs.
Forget After Reload	The AI Agent forgets the chat history and saved variables if the customer leaves the webpage, or refreshes or closes their browser tab.
Forget After…	The AI Agent forgets the chat history and saved variables after a predetermined time period that you define. This can be any number of minutes, hours, days, or weeks.

Additional persistence considerations

If your AI Agent hands customers off to a human agent it is best practice to select either Never Forget or Forget After… Selecting Forget After Tab Close will result in each new tab behaving as a unique chat session. This can become problematic when the AI Agent hands the customer off to a live agent. Multiple tabs with separate AI Agent conversations may confuse the customer. They may even start another handoff request flow.
When you select Never Forget, returning customers are not provided with the Greeting. Thus, this setting is not recommended if you use the Greeting to provide customers with important announcements such as realtime bug and outage updates.
The Customer Info within the Conversations view contains a combination of customer and session data. This means that the AI Agent may have collected variable data in a previous conversation.

Custom link protocols

Enable your AI Agent to send links with custom protocols (URI schemes) in messages (for example: yourbrand://link-to-page). These can be used to send customers deeplinks to specific parts of your application.

By default, your AI Agent supports sending links with these standard protocols: https, http, ftp, ftps, mailto, tel, callto, sms, cid, xmpp. Unless they are added to the allowlist, other protocols will be sanitized from messages to keep your customers safe.

Add an allowed link protocol

Add a link protocol to the approved link protocols list:

On the Ada dashboard, go to Channels > Chat, then go to the Privacy & data tab.
Beside Approved link protocols, click Add protocol. The Add Protocol window appears.
In the Add Protocol window, in the Protocol Name field, enter the link protocol or URI scheme you want to authorize. (This is the part of your link that appears just before ://, for example: yourbrand from yourbrand://deep-link.)
Click Add to add the protocol to the approved link protocols list.

Edit a link protocol

You can edit any link protocols already in your list.

On the Ada dashboard, go to Channels > Chat, then go to the Privacy & data tab.
Under Approved link protocols, click the pencil icon next to the link protocol you’d like to edit.
In the Edit Protocol window, make your changes in the Protocol Name field.
Click Save.

You’ll now see the updated link protocol in the list.

Remove a link protocol

On the Ada dashboard, go to Channels > Chat, then go to the Privacy & data tab.
Under Approved link protocols, click the trash can icon next to the link protocol you’d like to remove.
In the Confirm Protocol Deletion window that appears, click Delete.

This removes the link protocol from the list. Your AI Agent will no longer send links that use this protocol.