Advanced Behavior

Human-in-the-loop inside a chat

A workflow turn doesn't have to be a single request and response. A workflow can pause mid-run to ask the user a question and resume once they answer — all inside the same conversation.

When the workflow suspends with a question, the chat renders the prompt and waits. The user's answer is sent back to the running execution, which resumes from where it paused. This is the same suspend/resume mechanism described in Human in the Loop, surfaced conversationally: instead of an approval inbox or a Slack button, the question appears in the chat thread.

Use it for flows that need a clarification before continuing — confirming an action, collecting a missing field, or choosing between options — without leaving the chat.

Embedded chat

Setting the trigger's Mode to Embedded Chat keeps the workflow out of the hosted chat listings — the AI Hub composer's Workflows cascade and the Community Edition Chats page — and lets you drive it from your own UI. Your interface calls the New Chat Request webhook with the same { message, conversationId, attachments } body and renders the streamed reply however you like. The workflow contract is identical; only the front end changes.

This is the path to embedding a branded assistant in your own product while still building the logic as an ordinary ByteChef workflow.

Limitations

Keep these in mind when designing a chat workflow:

• The chat trigger runs synchronously. A turn occupies the chat until it returns; design workflows so a turn completes in a reasonable time, and lean on streamed output for long answers.
• Access follows the workflow. A user who can see a workflow's chat can run it; scope chat workflows the same way you scope any other workflow.
• Conversations are environment-isolated. A conversation is bound to the environment and workflow version it started against.
• A workflow chat is not the assistant. It runs your workflow, not the AI Hub agent, so the assistant's tools, memories, and specialist subagents don't apply inside it.