Conversation Overview

Overview

In Asiyst, a Conversation is an interactive, stateful dialogue between a website visitor and your configured AI assistant. Every conversation maintains multi-turn memory, captures real-time telemetry, associates knowledge citations, and can trigger client-side DOM actions like scrolling, page navigation, and product highlights.

Conversation Lifecycle & State Machine

Every conversation progresses through a strict, deterministic lifecycle:

  [Visitor Opens Widget]
           │
           ▼
    ┌──────────────┐
    │ Initializing │ ── (Exchange auth token & load assistant persona)
    └──────┬───────┘
           │
           ▼
    ┌──────────────┐
    │    Active    │ ◀───┐ (Exchange multi-turn messages & tokens)
    └──────┬───────┘     │
           │             │
    [Inactivity / Close] │ (Re-open within session TTL)
           │             │
           ▼             │
    ┌──────────────┐     │
    │  Suspended   │ ────┘
    └──────┬───────┘
           │ (After 30 min idle or explicit logout)
           ▼
    ┌──────────────┐
    │  Completed   │ ── (Persisted to analytics & transcript store)
    └──────────────┘

1. Initialization: The SDK mounts the Shadow DOM container, exchanges credentials via POST /api/v1/sdk/handshake, and downloads the active avatar and assistant manifest.

1. Active Dialogue: The visitor submits queries. The Asiyst Cloud context router queries dense vector indices, streams assistant tokens with low latency (< 180ms TTFT), and animates avatar mouth and gesture states.

1. Suspension: When the visitor minimizes the chat bubble or navigates to another page on the same domain, conversational state is preserved in sessionStorage and synchronized across browser tabs.

1. Completion: Conversations conclude upon explicit user logout (Asiyst.logout()) or when the 30-minute inactivity timeout triggers. Completed sessions are indexed for analytics dashboards.

Data Model & Anatomy

Each conversation object adheres to the canonical schema:

Relationship: Sessions, Conversations, and Turns

• Visitor Session (sess_...): Represents a visitor's entire visit across pages on your website. A session lasts until 30 minutes of complete inactivity.

• Conversation (conv_...): A continuous chat dialogue occurring within a session. A single visitor session can contain multiple distinct conversations if the visitor resets the chat.

• Turn (turn_...): A paired exchange comprising a single user message and the corresponding AI assistant response with its grounding citations and token stream.

Real-Time Streaming Protocol

Asiyst streams conversational responses using either WebSockets (wss://api.asiyst.com) or HTTP/2 Server-Sent Events (SSE). As the LLM generates tokens, each chunk is pushed immediately to the client to render smooth typewriter animations and synchronize real-time avatar lip movements without buffering the entire response.