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Getting Started

Getting Started with Hydra

Learn what Hydra is, how to set up your account, and take your first steps with the platform.

Getting Started with Hydra

Hydra is an AI-powered support and operations platform. It combines a customer-facing chat widget, a ticketing system, a CRM, workflow automation, and a customizable dashboard — all configured by describing what you need in plain language.

What you can do with Hydra

  • Support — Embed a chat widget on your website. Customers chat with an AI bot backed by your knowledge base. Complex issues escalate to tickets.
  • Inbox — Manage live conversations with customers across channels. Assign conversations, suggest replies with AI, and escalate to tickets.
  • CRM — Track Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities through their lifecycle. Log events, run onboarding plans, and monitor account health scores.
  • Flows — Automate actions based on events. When a ticket is created, when a customer churns, when an account reaches a milestone — define the trigger, the conditions, and the actions.
  • Mini-apps — Build custom dashboard views by describing what you want to see. The AI generates a live data panel and adds it to your sidebar.

Your first steps

When you first log into Hydra, you'll see the Adoption Panel on your home screen. It shows your current adoption score and an onboarding checklist. Work through these items to get the most out of the platform:

  1. Configure your bot — Go to Bots under the Support sidebar group, open the bot you want to edit, and set its persona, behaviors, and any directives. See Bots — Persona, Behaviors, and Directives for the layer-by-layer guide.
  2. Seed your knowledge base — Go to Knowledge and add your first source. You can scrape a URL, paste plain text, or upload an API schema.
  3. Embed the widget — Copy the embed snippet from Settings and add it to your website's HTML before the closing </body> tag.
  4. Test a conversation — Open your website and start a chat. Verify the bot responds correctly.
  5. Deploy a flow — Go to Flows, create a new flow, and describe a simple automation (e.g. "when a high-priority ticket is created, add an internal note").

The dashboard

The left sidebar is your navigation. What appears there depends on which modules are enabled for your account. By default you'll see:

  • Home — Adoption score, onboarding checklist, and contextual tips
  • Inbox — Live customer conversations
  • Tickets — Escalated support issues
  • Knowledge — Your bot's information sources
  • Flows — Automation rules
  • Analytics — Platform performance metrics
  • Settings — All configuration options

As you enable additional modules, the CRM group adds Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities; Reports appears under Analytics; and Mini-Apps lives at the bottom of the sidebar under its own group.

Search anything fast — ⌘K / Ctrl+K

Press ⌘K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows / Linux) from any dashboard page to open the search palette. It searches across:

  • Conversations — by subject
  • Tickets — by title
  • Contacts and Leads — by name, email, or company
  • Accounts — by name or domain
  • Help articles — by title

Use ↑ and ↓ to move through results, Enter to open one, Esc to close. Results are scoped to your tenant and capped at 8 per category, so you can scan everything at once.

Getting help

Click the ? button in the bottom-right corner of any dashboard page to open the help panel. Ask questions in plain language and the assistant will guide you.