#Human in the loop

Two things decide when a person takes over: the agent's handoff block, which you deploy, and the business hours, which whoever runs the inbox sets.

agent:
  instructions: ...
  handoff:
    after_turns: 8
    when:
      - el cliente pide hablar con una persona
      - reclamo por un cobro

Declaring handoff is what gives the agent the tool to hand a conversation over. Calling it marks the chat as waiting for a person; it shows up that way in the inbox, and whoever replies there or from the WhatsApp Business app takes it over. Vatio does not notify anyone yet.

The agent says so plainly. It is an assistant, it does not pretend otherwise, and when it hands something over it tells the visitor it is checking with a colleague and will come back with an answer — no invented errand to cover for it. Several jurisdictions require disclosing that a person is talking to a machine, and a single honest behavior is one less thing to get wrong.

#When it escalates

handoff.when is your own list of conditions, in your words, and goes into the prompt. handoff.after_turns is the deterministic floor under it: past that many visitor messages the handoff happens whether or not the model asked for one. A visitor who asks for a human in plain words always triggers one — that never depends on the model's judgement. Declare neither and escalation is entirely the model's judgement.

#Business hours

The hours are not in vatio.yml. They belong to the people who answer, so they are set on the Business page of the inbox: a time zone and one or more shifts per day. A developer setting a workspace up can use vatio business hours instead. They apply to every environment as soon as they are saved, and an hours: block left in vatio.yml is ignored with a warning.

The agent is given the week, so it can tell a customer when you are open. The hours do not decide who answers — the agent triages and tries to resolve either way. They decide what happens after it gives up:

With no hours set the agent is treated as always reachable, so a handoff always quiets it. A handoff nobody picks up within an hour hands the conversation back to the agent rather than leaving the visitor with a promise and silence.