Managing Your Sidekick

Your sidekick is live — now learn how to fine-tune its personality, swap voices, update abilities, and keep it performing at its best.

The Sidekick Detail Page

After creating your sidekick, the detail page is your control center. To get there, navigate to Sidekicks and click on the sidekick you want to manage.

Sidekick Detail — Configuration

From here you can edit every aspect of your sidekick's configuration. Changes take effect immediately — no need to redeploy or restart anything.

Editing Name & Description

Your sidekick's name is what appears in the chat header and embed UI. The description appears below the name and helps users understand what the sidekick can help with.

The slug is the URL-friendly version of the name (e.g., "my-support-agent"). This is part of your embed URL, so changing it will update the embed URL as well. If you've already embedded your sidekick somewhere, update the embed code after changing the slug.

Changes to name and description are reflected immediately in the embed. Users who refresh the page will see the updated information.

Refining the System Prompt

The system prompt is the most important configuration option. It tells your sidekick who it is, how to behave, and what boundaries to follow. You can edit it at any time from the detail page.

Tips for effective prompts

Be specific about identity: "You are Luna, a customer support specialist for Acme Corp" works better than "You are a helpful assistant"
Set tone guidelines: "Respond in a warm, conversational tone. Keep answers under 3 sentences unless the user asks for more detail."
Define boundaries: "You only answer questions about our products and services. For anything else, politely redirect the user to our website."
Include key facts: "Our business hours are 9am-5pm EST, Monday through Friday. Our return policy allows 30-day returns on all items."

Pro Tip: Use the AI-assisted prompt generator in the wizard to create a strong starting point, then refine from the detail page as you test and learn what works best for your audience.

Changing Voice & LLM

You can change your sidekick's voice and language model at any time. These changes take effect on the next conversation — active conversations will continue with the current settings.

Voice

Select a text-to-speech voice from your configured provider (Cartesia, ElevenLabs, or Speechify). You can preview voices before committing. Consider your audience — a warm, casual voice works well for consumer-facing sidekicks, while a clear, professional voice suits business applications.

Language Model (LLM)

The LLM determines how smart and fast your sidekick is. If you're using Sidekick Forge Inference, the optimized defaults are already selected. If you're using BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys), you can choose from:

Cerebras — Best for voice chat (ultra-low latency)
Groq — Great for voice chat (fast with strong reasoning)
OpenAI GPT-4o — Best for complex text conversations
Anthropic Claude — Excellent for nuanced, safety-conscious responses
DeepInfra — Open-source models at competitive pricing

For voice conversations: Latency matters most. Cerebras and Groq keep response times under 500ms so conversations feel natural. OpenAI and Anthropic are more capable but slightly slower — better suited for text-only chat.

Managing Abilities

You can add or remove abilities from your sidekick at any time. Go to the Abilities page to see all available tools and toggle them on or off for each sidekick.

When you enable a new ability, it becomes available in the next conversation. You don't need to update your embed code or restart anything.

For a detailed guide on each ability, see Abilities & Tools.

Updating the Avatar

Your sidekick's avatar appears in the chat header and alongside messages. Upload a custom image from the detail page — square images (at least 200x200px) work best. The avatar is displayed as a circle in most contexts.

If your sidekick uses video mode, the avatar image is also used as the visual representation during video conversations (animated with the Ken Burns effect).

Previewing Changes

After making changes, use the Preview button on the detail page to test your sidekick immediately. The preview supports all three chat modes:

Text — Type a message and see how your sidekick responds with the updated configuration
Voice — Start a voice conversation to hear the new voice and test conversational flow
Video — Test the video mode with avatar animation

Preview sessions use the same infrastructure as production conversations, so what you see in preview is exactly what your users will experience.

Understanding Usage Stats

The detail page shows usage statistics for each sidekick:

Voice minutes — Total time spent in voice conversations this billing period
Text messages — Number of text messages exchanged
Embedding chunks — Knowledge base chunks used in responses

For a comprehensive view across all your sidekicks, see the Monitoring Dashboard.