Troubleshooting the chatbot
Common issues and fixes — empty answers, missing widget, 403 errors, and stale results after switching providers.
The widget doesn't appear on the front end
All four must be true:
- Enable AI Assistant (Settings → AI) is on.
- Enable Deflection Chatbot (Settings → AI) is on.
- You're logged in.
- You're an admin/agent, or you hold at least one active, non-blocked license.
The chatbot keeps saying "I couldn't find exactly what you're looking for"
Usually one of:
- Your knowledge index is empty. Open Settings → AI → Chatbot Knowledge Index. If chunk counts are all zero, click Reindex Now.
- You switched AI providers. Different embedding models produce incompatible vectors. Always reindex after switching the embeddings provider.
- Your KB really doesn't cover the topic yet. The chatbot is supposed to refuse rather than hallucinate. Add a relevant KB article or wait for the AI to draft one from a resolved ticket.
Saving a KB article or product gives a 403 on shared hosting
This is your host's ModSecurity WAF blocking rich-text HTML in the request body. EnvaTicket already wraps WYSIWYG fields in base64 before submission, but if you still see 403s, ask your host to disable ModSecurity for your admin URL, or whitelist your account.
The chatbot answer looks stale
The response cache is 24 hours. If you just updated a KB article and want to test, run php artisan cache:clear on your server. The cache automatically refreshes after 24 hours regardless.
OpenAI returns "invalid API key"
Confirm the key is current on the OpenAI dashboard, has billing enabled, and has been pasted without trailing spaces. EnvaTicket sends the key as Authorization: Bearer … on every request — if your host blocks outgoing connections to OpenAI, contact them to whitelist the destination.