v267 AI Bot Design with Automate Viber 🤖

"I checked it very thoroughly, and that quite definitely is the answer." - Deep Thought, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 🤖
SentiOne Automate version 267 was released on 22.10.2026. Alongside this version we are publishing Automate Viber, an open-source AI harness for designing bots with your favorite coding agent. The release also gives every project its own Knowledge Base, introduces project routes for switching bot versions without reconfiguration, and makes semantic search intent detection available on every environment by default.

Automate Viber: AI Harness for Bot Design

Together with v267 we are publishing Automate Viber, an open-source toolkit (Apache 2.0) for building and changing Automate bots with an AI coding agent. It works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot and any other agent that follows the AGENTS.md convention. Every agent reads the same set of verified rules.

The harness turns the agent into a careful editor of your project rather than a free-form generator:

Round trip through the Public API. Export a project, let the agent modify its flows and NLU, validate the result, and import it back. All of this runs from the command line, with multiple environments and profiles supported.
Verified building blocks only. The agent reuses block structures from reference projects instead of inventing them, and checks every change against a validation checklist before anything is imported.
You stay in control. Each task starts with analysis and a proposed change plan. Nothing is modified until you approve it, and the original export is never overwritten.
Conversation insights. Built-in reports analyse conversation exports to show where users drop off, which blocks trigger fallbacks or loops, and how conversations move between blocks and tags, including interactive graphs.
Secure by default. Your API key is kept in the operating system's keychain and is never stored in the repository or passed through the chat.

After importing changes, train the NLU in the NLU module and test the bot as usual.

Project Knowledge Base

Each project now has its own Knowledge Base, next to Flows, NLUs and Integrations. Items stored there belong to that one bot, so two projects can use the same key for different values without getting in each other's way.

Project first, shared second. When a flow reads knowledge.*, the value is taken from the project's own Knowledge Base first. Only if the key is not there does it fall back to the organization-wide Knowledge Base. The flow syntax does not change, so existing bots keep working as they are.
No expiry. Project Items stay until someone deletes them. Expiry dates and connectors remain features of the organization-wide Knowledge Base.
Travels with the project. Project Items are included in project export and import. Updating an existing project replaces its Items with the ones from the archive, the same way it replaces flows and NLUs. Archives from earlier versions still import without errors.
CSV import and export. Items can be moved in and out as CSV, using the same file format as the organization-wide Knowledge Base, so an existing export can be imported into a project without editing.
Same permissions. Access is controlled by the existing Knowledge Base permissions; no new role is needed.

To keep the two scopes apart in the interface, the organization-wide module has been renamed to Shared Knowledge. Its features and links are unchanged. Read more about Items.

Project Routes

A route is a stable, human-readable address for a bot, for example call-steering, that is independent of any single project. Each route points to a live project that serves regular traffic and, optionally, a candidate project that serves test traffic. Releasing a new version of a bot becomes a matter of switching a pointer. Nothing that addresses the bot needs to be edited.

Route registry. A new screen lists your organization's routes with their live and candidate projects. Changing a pointer asks for confirmation and shows the old and new target, and every change is recorded in the route's history. A project that is used by a route cannot be deleted.
Channels pinned to a route. A channel can now point to a route and variant instead of a specific project. For example, a test phone number configured once against the candidate variant always reaches the bot's current candidate.
Transfer to Flow by route. The Transfer to Flow block can target another bot by its route, so cross-bot transfers keep working across version switches. Conversations in candidate mode are transferred to the target's candidate, and live conversations to its live version.
Safe switching. A conversation stays on the version it started on for its whole life. A pointer switch affects only new conversations, so ongoing ones are never reset mid-dialogue.
Gateway and Public API. Conversations can be started, streamed and ended through the Gateway API by addressing a route. The Public API gains endpoints to list, create and inspect routes and to set or clear their pointers, which makes routes easy to drive from your own release pipeline.

Full API documentation is available at automate.help.sentione.com/reference.

Semantic Search for Everyone

Intent detection using semantic search is now available on every environment out of the box. Semantic search NLU models can be selected, imported and validated without any additional configuration, and the classic intentizer works exactly as before. On-premise installations can also use locally hosted embedding models, keeping data inside their own infrastructure.

💊 IMPROVEMENTS

[API] Automate Viber, an open-source AI harness for editing projects with coding agents through the Public API
[Knowledge Base] Each project has its own Knowledge Base, resolved before the shared one when flows read knowledge.*
[Knowledge Base] Project Items included in project export and import, with CSV import and export
[Knowledge Base] Organization-level module renamed to Shared Knowledge to distinguish it from project knowledge
[Flow] Project routes with live and candidate pointers, change confirmation and pointer history
[Flow] Transfer to Flow block can address the target bot by route
[Flow] Minimap can be shown or hidden from the canvas toolbar and marks blocks with errors
[Integration] Channels can be pinned to a route and variant instead of a specific project
[API] Public API endpoints to list, create and inspect routes and to set or clear their pointers
[API] Gateway API can start, stream and end conversations addressed by route
[NLU] Semantic search intent detection enabled by default on every environment
[NLU] On-premise installations can use locally hosted embedding models
[LLM] Configurable request timeout for LLM calls in flows, up to 45 seconds; timeouts are now logged in Conversations
[LLM] Retired OpenAI models (GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4.1 nano, o1, o3-mini, o4-mini) removed, with existing configurations updated during upgrade
[Mobile] Option to pass the external JWT and its decoded claims to the bot flow
[UI] Refreshed sidebar with the current project name more prominent
[Security] Updated third-party components to address known vulnerabilities

🐛 FIXES

[NLU] Analysing very long messages with a trained model no longer fails
[Voice] Errors returned by speech recognition and text-to-speech providers are now reported when validating or saving voice settings
[WebChat] Carousels are displayed correctly when a response contains more than one command
[Chat Tester] The active block is fully highlighted during a test conversation, and tag tooltips are no longer cropped

Follow the changelog for more exciting new features! 👋