---
title: Session Starter Bot
---

# Session Starter Bot

## What it is

A per-channel automation in **Team Chat** that watches for messages matching your keywords and spawns an AI session automatically. You configure one bot per channel; it runs while Omniscio is open.

## Where to find it

### How to set it up

1. In Team Chat, right-click a channel in the sidebar.
2. Click **Session Bot** in the context menu (visible to the channel creator and workspace admins).
3. Check **Enable** to turn it on.
4. Choose a **Target project** for spawned sessions.
5. (Optional) Enter **Keywords** as a comma-separated list. A message matching any keyword (case-insensitive substring) triggers the bot. Leave keywords empty to trigger on every message.
6. (Optional) Set a **Daily rate limit** to cap how many sessions it spawns per day. `0` means unlimited.
7. Click **Save**.

## How it behaves

### Reply modes

The bot has two modes that control what happens after it spawns a session:

### Canned acknowledgment (default)

When **Post acknowledgment reply** is checked, the bot posts a one-liner back to the channel confirming it started a session. This is purely informational and costs nothing extra. Uncheck it for silent operation.

You can customize the acknowledgment text in the **Custom reply message** field (up to 500 characters). Leave it blank to use the default ("Session started for this message in project ..."). The custom message field only appears when acknowledgment is enabled and conversational reply mode is off.

### Conversational reply (opt-in)

Check **Reply conversationally** and the spawned session reads the channel, then posts a genuine reply back as your agent (shown as "Your Name's agent"). The canned acknowledgment is skipped in this mode.

**Important:** The reply agent reads untrusted channel text and runs with tools. Only enable this on channels you trust. Its prompt fixes the channel (never derived from message content) and flags messages as data, but reply mode is still a per-channel trust decision.

### Safety and limits

- **Your own messages trigger normally.** The bot responds to all human messages in the channel, including yours. Loop safety is handled by the agent-authorship flag (below), not by filtering your messages.
- **Minimum length.** Messages under 10 characters are ignored.
- **Dedup.** The same message is never processed twice (bounded in-memory dedup).
- **Loop safety.** An agent never replies to another agent's message. This is enforced by a per-channel flag that tracks whether the last message was authored by an agent, so the bot cannot trigger a runaway reply loop.
- **Rate limit.** The daily cap (if set) resets at midnight. A `0` limit means unlimited spawns per day.
- **App must be running.** The bot runs inside Omniscio (renderer-triggered). Messages sent while the app is closed are not evaluated.
- **Single-device.** If you run Omniscio on two machines simultaneously, both may trigger on the same message.

### Workspaces

The bot works in both your company workspace and user-created (self-serve) workspaces. You can configure a bot on any channel in any workspace you belong to, and it triggers the same way regardless of which workspace type the channel is in.

Behind the scenes, the company workspace and self-serve workspaces use separate Firestore listeners. A background watcher monitors up to 5 self-serve workspaces simultaneously. Desktop notifications for workspace messages are a planned follow-up.

## For agents

### Where the configuration lives

Bot settings are stored locally (SQLite, soft-deleted). One bot per channel (upsert replaces). Disabling the bot deletes its configuration row.

The four IPC channels (`GET_STARTER_BOT`, `UPSERT_STARTER_BOT`, `DELETE_STARTER_BOT`, `EVALUATE_STARTER_BOT`) are unchanged by the menu redesign; only the UI entry point moved from Edit Channel to its own dialog.

## Related

Nothing else in the library documents this bot directly, so start from [INDEX.md](INDEX.md), the library index, if you are looking for the pages covering Team Chat, notifications and automation nearby.