Charla Reviews

The app works well and has the features we need, but it has gone down several times over the past few months. Each outage disrupts our workflow, which becomes frustrating. We like the product overall, but the reliability issues need attention.

[EDIT: My chatbot was not functioning but they got it back to functioning with just the knowledge base as training data.]

The pros: Good widget customization, knowledge base for customers to navigate directly, ability to direct customers based on "special instructions" you give it in direct text. You can get some ROI with it.

Cons: The AI chatbot does not train on web pages or PDFs or Word documents in my experience even though it is supposed to. It should be able to integrate with Google Calendar or Calendly or Tidycal but currently cannot.

Devs: Get the crawler and doc reader working much better. Allow users to bring their own OpenAI API key for credit usage. Get a calendar integration with a highly popular tool.

I initially thought I was purchasing a plug-and-play chatbot builder with an integrated AI knowledge base. However, it appears I can’t even install the older JavaScript code via Google Tag Manager.

I’ve contacted support about this issue in the last 24-48h but haven’t received a response yet. This lack of communication has significantly reduced my trust in the company’s long-term reliability.

I also tried to train the chatbot, but the backend is overly complicated — it feels like a maze with far too many configuration steps. It’s exhausting just thinking about setting everything up manually. Moreover, the knowledge base feature doesn’t even allow adding URLs for AI training; instead, you’re required to create individual articles for each response.

I’ll be requesting a refund, as I need a chatbot that can be set up quickly and supports e-commerce sales agent functionality.

Charla has covered all aspects of a virtual agent feature set. I only tested its core functionality as a virtual chatbot so far and have struggled with the responses generated by chatbot from web page resources provided in the AI Agent section. It did not provide any answers from the web page link. So I converted website into PDF and uploaded those documents but even then, the response mostly are Sorry I am unable to find this information. Not sure if there is a trick to training it. Would love to see it responding to basic questions as I have purchased multiple tiers.

The program is absolutely non-functional:
1) There was a major issue with connecting Facebook – I only managed to do it the following day.
2) Tests showed that:
- not all incoming client messages go through (including attached files)
- not all outgoing messages to clients are delivered (e.g., an FAQ article)
- the content of written messages “disappears” from the interface – although it shows up correctly for the recipient
- it is very slow. The program we currently use works 100% stably.
3) In the settings, you can choose the language from which messages will most often be translated… but you cannot change the application’s interface language, which means non-English speakers cannot comfortably use it (including AI ticket summaries, which are all in English).

If the program worked properly, I would gladly keep it, because the idea behind it is good. I would, however, add the ability to respond to a ticket using the same messenger it came from (for example, as an attachment).

At this point I have to return it, and I’m frustrated because in order to buy it I had to purchase an AppSumo plan… so even a refund won’t really solve the problem.

Marek