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What is EPAV Desk

A hosted help desk with an AI assistant that answers your customers from your own knowledge base and passes the rest to your team.

S System · Last updated

EPAV Desk is a customer support platform that EPAV hosts for you: one panel for conversations from your website chat, email, Telegram, WhatsApp and your mobile app, plus an AI assistant that answers from your own knowledge base and passes everything else to your agents. You register at https://my.epavdesk.com and get a working support site right away, with nothing to install.

What you get when you register

Registering in the cabinet at https://my.epavdesk.com normally assigns you your own support site at once, and it starts working within a minute. The site already has:

  • a support panel at its own address, where you and your agents handle conversations and change settings;
  • a chat for your website, with the code to paste into your pages;
  • an AI assistant that answers visitors in that chat;
  • a team that receives the conversations the assistant hands over, with you as a member.

No card is needed to try it. See Your account and your site and First steps checklist.

Nothing to install or update

EPAV runs the platform and installs its updates. An update keeps what you set in the panel: the site name, the language, the chat, the assistant, your team and your email settings stay as they were. Before an update EPAV takes a copy of your site's database, and if the new version does not start, your site goes back to the previous one by itself. Every company gets a separate installation with its own database, see Where your data is stored.

How the AI assistant answers

The assistant answers only from your knowledge base and, if you connect them, from your own systems through custom tools. Besides its instructions, the code itself checks the result: a long answer written without any article found in the knowledge base, and without data from a custom tool, is never sent. In that case the conversation goes to your agents with the reason recorded, or, in an AI chat without agents, the visitor hears that the knowledge base has no answer. By default the assistant replies in the visitor's language, and it answers voice messages too. See How the assistant answers and Handoff to agents and back.

The first message says an AI is answering

In the website chat, the mobile app, Telegram and WhatsApp, every conversation the assistant answers starts with a message telling the customer that an AI assistant is answering. The code adds this notice, and there is no switch to remove it: Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires it. Email is the exception, because the platform sends no automatic first message by email.

All channels in one inbox

Conversations from every channel arrive in one shared list in the panel, and agents answer them from the same place:

Customers can also send voice messages, and the platform turns them into text, see Voice messages.

Tools for your agents

The panel is a complete help desk, not only a bot:

  • Tags, your own conversation Statuses, snoozing and search keep the inbox tidy and find any conversation quickly.
  • Automatic assignment spreads new conversations over the team, with a cap on how many each agent gets at once.
  • Macros send a saved reply and change tags or other fields of the conversation in one click.
  • Automations run rules that tag, assign and route conversations when their conditions match.
  • SLA policies and Business hours set response time targets and warn before a target is missed.
  • CSAT Surveys ask customers to rate the conversation after it is resolved.
  • Custom attributes add your own fields to contacts and conversations, for example a customer's tariff or their first order date.
  • AI helpers rewrite a draft reply with one click, for example to sound friendlier, and a copilot answers agents' questions about the conversation and the knowledge base.
  • Roles give each agent exactly the permissions they need.
  • Activity logs record the changes agents and admins make, for audits.
  • The Supervisor panel and Reports show the queue, the workload and the conversations that wait too long.

See Agents and teams, Roles and permissions, Automation rules, Macros, tags, SLA and business hours, AI helpers for agents and Supervisor panel.

Knowledge base and help center

The assistant works from the knowledge base you fill: upload files, add links or a whole sitemap, connect a Confluence wiki, or let your own AI assistant maintain the articles over MCP. The platform can also propose new articles from conversations your agents resolved, and they join the knowledge base only after you approve them. A public help center with collections, search, its own look and articles in many languages can feed the assistant as well.

See Knowledge base basics, Importing files, links and sitemaps, Confluence connector, Connect your AI (MCP), Learning from resolved conversations and Help center.

AI chat without agents

If nobody on your side answers chats, switch the website chat, a Telegram inbox or a WhatsApp inbox to AI chat without agents. The assistant then answers on its own, never promises a human, and says so when the knowledge base has no answer. See AI chat without agents.

Which AI model answers

You decide which model writes the answers:

  • the cloud AI of your plan, included in the price after payment, with our free model on the trial and when the plan's cloud AI runs out, offered without an availability guarantee;
  • your own cloud provider with your own API key, which bills you directly at its own prices, with no markup from EPAV;
  • your own model on your own hardware, set up by EPAV for a separate fee, so that AI providers do not see your conversations; the panel, the conversations and the knowledge base are still hosted by EPAV.

See AI providers and your own model.

Languages

The panel is fully translated into English, Russian, Ukrainian, Estonian, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese, among others. Remaining interface languages are partly translated and show English where a translation is missing. By default the assistant replies in the visitor's language, and help center articles can be written in many languages.

Your brand

The panel sign-in page and the emails to your agents show your site name and logo. The help center has its own logo and colors, and the chat's colors are set in the Designer tab of the chat inbox. The chat shows a small "Powered by EPAV Desk" line, which you can hide with Show powered by in the chat's Appearance tab.

What EPAV Desk does not do

There are no phone calls and no voice bot. Customers can send voice messages, and when someone asks to be called back, the assistant asks for the number and a convenient time and passes them to your agents, who call from their own phones. See Voice messages.

Plans

Every plan includes every feature. The plans differ only in limits on agents, knowledge base size and storage, and conversations are not billed at all. Usage above the limits can be paid for only on Ultra; on the other plans you move to a higher plan instead. See Plans, limits and billing.

Built on open source

The panel is a modified version of an open-source help desk licensed under AGPL-3.0, and every site offers the source code of the exact version it runs. See Source code and license.

See it working

The support chat on epavai.com runs on EPAV Desk. To try it with your own knowledge base, register at https://my.epavdesk.com.

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