Draft - How to Create & Share Talkables
Talkables let your content do the work: answering buyer questions in real time, qualifying their needs, and guiding them toward the next step. This guide walks you through creating your first Talkable from start to publish, then shows you how to share it and see what buyers asked. If you build content in Consensus, you're in the right place.
|
Before you start • Talkables is an add-on license. If you don't see it in your account, contact your Consensus account team or start a chat with Support. (Not yet available for accounts hosted on OCI.) • Have your content ready as a PDF or MP4 — those are the supported formats today. • You'll need a role that can create content: Admin, Content Author, or Manager. |
The Whole Journey at a Glance
Creating a Talkable starts with two quick choices — the kind of agent you're building, and the file it's built from — followed by a five-step setup checklist. If you've built one before, this overview is probably all you need; the full walkthrough below has company for every step.
| 1 | Intro & Objectives Define the use case, opening message, and what you want to learn from buyers. |
| 2 | Conversational Design Fine-tune the personality, voice, and behavior of your AI agent. |
| 3 | Entry Form Set up the buyer-facing welcome screen and data collection gate. |
| 4 | Add More Assets Enrich your Talkable with additional content and downloadable files. |
| 5 | Review & Test Verify AI-labeled content and preview the full buyer experience before publishing. |
Head to Library → Talkables in the Consensus web app and click Create new Talkable (you'll also find Talkable under Create in the sidebar). Before you upload anything, the builder asks one question that shapes everything after it: "Which agent should we build?"
|
The three agent types • Demonstrate — the expert guide. Turns your content into an interactive experience that handles questions, highlights key points, and drives action. Pick this for demos, product overviews, and sales content. • Enable — the trainer. Coaches users through complex material with guided paths and built-in knowledge checks. Pick this for onboarding, training, and process documents. • Discover — the researcher. Runs adaptive interviews that gather insights from customers, prospects, and users at scale. Pick this when the goal is learning from your audience rather than teaching them. |
Not sure? Demonstrate is the classic Talkable most teams start with — and there's an Or, start from a template option below the three cards if you'd rather begin from a working example. [VERIFY template gallery contents before publishing]
[SCREENSHOT: the "Which agent should we build?" chooser]
Pick a type and the upload window opens. Click to upload or drag in your PDF or MP4 — when the file shows a checkmark in the list, hit Create document. Then give it a moment: your document is analyzed and labeled by the AI, which takes roughly 3–10 minutes depending on the queue. You don't have to sit and watch — the builder generates a description, sections, and headline for you in the background while you work through the setup.
Two small things worth knowing here. You can rename the Talkable anytime from the top bar — click the pencil icon next to the title, type the new name, and confirm with the checkmark. And each agent type gets its own setup panel after upload: for Enable, that's the Teaching path setup — choose how many steps the learning sequence should have, pick an interaction style (True or false, Multiple choice question, or Role play), describe your goal ("What should the learner know or be able to do by the end?"), and click Generate to have the guided path built for you. [VERIFY the equivalent setup panels for Demonstrate and Discover]
[SCREENSHOT: Enable teaching-path setup with goal field and Generate]
With the job chosen and the document uploaded, the builder opens with the familiar five-step checklist running down the left side. A green check appears next to each step as you complete it — that's your progress bar for everything below.
[SCREENSHOT: Talkables library with the Create new Talkable tile]
Step 1: Set the Intro & Objectives
This first step decides what your Talkable is for — everything else builds on it, so it's worth a minute of thought before you click through.
Start with the Use Case. The agent type you chose at creation sets the starting point here, and you can refine it — pick a different scenario, or stay on Custom and shape it yourself with Edit initial prompt. The use case quietly steers how the agent behaves in every conversation, so choose for the outcome you want — qualifying leads behaves differently than educating customers. [VERIFY how the Step-1 use-case selector interacts with the new agent-type chooser]
Next, write your Intro Statement — the first thing buyers hear from your agent. Make it an invitation, not a greeting. Something like: "I can personalize the content, summarize sections, read aloud or quiz you… so — what drew you to this white paper?" That last question matters: it gets the buyer talking, and what they say first is usually the most honest signal you'll capture.
If you'd like buyers to see a familiar face before the conversation starts, add an Intro Video or Audio Greeting. Upload an MP4, WebM, MP3, or WAV (up to 100 MB), or just paste a Loom link. It's optional, but a ten-second personal welcome does a lot of trust-building for cold audiences.
[SCREENSHOT: Step 1 — use case selector and intro statement field]
You'll know you're done when Step 1 shows a green check in the sidebar. On to the fun part.
Step 2: Design the Conversation
This is where your agent gets its personality. There's a lot on this screen, but only the first three settings really shape the buyer's experience — the rest you can safely leave on defaults for your first Talkable and revisit later.
Quick Actions are the tappable prompts buyers see at the start — things like Personalized to me and 2-min summary. They're the fastest way to get a hesitant buyer engaging, because tapping is easier than typing. Keep the Show to user toggle on, and turn on Keep after click if you want the buttons to stay available after the first tap. You can add your own with the + Add new button — write them the way a buyer would ask.
Then set the Assertiveness Level. This is the slider between "helpful assistant" and "closer," with five settings: Passive (mainly assists with the content), Gentle, Balanced (equal parts assistant and sales), Moderate (leans into business outcomes), and Strong (goes in for the close). If you're not sure, start at Balanced — you can always turn it up once you've read a few real conversations.
Pick a Voice your audience will actually enjoy listening to. There are four personas — Energetic, Chill, Wise, and Funny — each in male and female variants, and the Try it out button plays a sample so you're not choosing blind.
Those three set the experience. The rest of the screen is seasoning:
Agent Skills add capabilities like Diagrams (beta), Source Audio Playback (beta), calendar booking, and email follow-up. Turn on only what serves this Talkable's goal — a white paper probably wants calendar booking; it probably doesn't need diagrams. Background Music offers ambient options (Flow state, Frequencies, Meditation) if silence isn't your brand. And if you're in a regulated industry, Special Agent Instructions is your guardrail field — write directives ("Never discuss pricing") rather than suggestions, and the agent will hold the line.
[SCREENSHOT: Step 2 — assertiveness levels and Agent Skills]
Once the check mark lands on Step 2, your agent has a personality. Now let's decide who gets to meet it.
Step 3: Build the Entry Form
Think of the Entry Form as your Talkable's front door — it's where a buyer decides whether to walk in, and where you decide what you'd like to know about them first.
When you open this step, you'll see the welcome screen exactly as your buyer will: your company logo top left, a welcome title and description, a language selector, an AI persona selector, the name and email fields, and the Get started button. Hover over any text and click the pencil icon to make it your own. The default copy works fine, but a title that names the buyer's problem always lands better than "Welcome."
By default the form asks for name and email. If your team needs more — company size, role, region — click + Add more Fields and add them one at a time. Everything a buyer enters here comes back to you on the lead. Just remember that every extra field adds friction at the door, so only ask for what you'll actually use.
[SCREENSHOT: Step 3 — entry form editor with Add more Fields]
Save it, watch the check appear, and your front door is ready.
Step 4: Add More Assets
Your Talkable already knows the document or video you started with. This step is where you hand it the rest of the shelf, so it can answer questions your main asset doesn't cover.
Upload or drag in additional PDFs and videos, pull content from your library, or paste website URLs — the agent draws on all of it when a buyer asks something. If a buyer might ask about pricing tiers, add the pricing one-pager here; it's much better than letting the agent say "I don't know."
[VERIFY BEFORE PUBLISHING: Dynamic Tours can also appear as attached documents — confirm official support, then document or delete this line.]
There's one more option worth knowing: downloadable assets. Upload a PDF here (PDF is the only downloadable format) and buyers can save it during their session straight from the toolbar — handy for spec sheets and data sheets people want to forward internally.
[SCREENSHOT: Step 4 — asset list with a downloadable file]
With your content stocked, there's just one step left: making sure the AI actually read it all correctly.
Step 5: Review, Test, and Publish
Before your Talkable meets a buyer, you get to check its homework. This step shows every page of your document on a canvas, with the regions the AI identified highlighted in numbered bounding boxes.
The Data points panel on the left summarizes what the AI found — how many pieces of Text, Figures, Tables, and Marginalia it labeled. Use the thumbnail strip on the right to jump between pages. If a label looks off (a chart tagged as text, a footnote treated as content), just click and drag to fix or create a region. You usually won't need to touch much — but the pages buyers care about most are worth a skim. You can also add Speaker Notes to a page to guide how the agent presents that section, and if the source document itself changes later, Replace PDF swaps it without rebuilding anything.
Now the good part. Click the orange Talk to it button in the top right and have a real conversation with your Talkable. Ask it the questions your buyers will ask — including the awkward ones. Two minutes of testing here saves you from surprises in front of a prospect.
Happy with it? Switch the status dropdown in the top right from Draft to Active. That's the moment your Talkable goes live — and you can flip it back to Draft or Archived anytime without breaking anything permanently.
[SCREENSHOT: Step 5 — canvas with labeled regions and the Talk to it button]
Share Your Talkable
Once it's Active, you have three main roads to buyers — pick based on where they already are.
Send a link. The simplest path: a direct link with a name/email gate. For campaigns, generate UTM-tracked links (up to five sources per Talkable) so you can see which channel drives conversations. For a key account, create a personalized one-to-one link — the agent greets that person by name — or upload a CSV to generate personalized links for a whole prospect list at once. There's a QR code option too, styled to your brand, which works great on event booths and printed leave-behinds.
Embed it on your site. The iframe embed comes in eight presentation styles (Classic through Scroll), or use the lightweight card widget if you just want a small entry point on a page.
Put it in a DemoBoard. Attach the Talkable as an asset, or add it as a CTA button so buyers can open it right from the demo player — a natural "still have questions?" companion to a demo.
See What Buyers Asked
This is where Talkables pay you back. Open a Talkable's Performance view and you'll see the funnel from Link Opened → Conversations → Deep Engagement → Meeting Booked, alongside chat rate, average talk time, and the companies reached. Every session lives in the AI Conversations dashboard, where you can read transcripts, filter, and export to CSV.
Don't skip the Content Gaps tab. It collects the buyer questions your content couldn't answer — which is both a to-do list for Step 4 and, honestly, some of the best market intelligence you'll get for free.
Troubleshooting
You don't see Talkables in your account. It's an add-on — check with your admin whether it's enabled, or contact your Consensus account team.
A file won't upload. Check the format: PDFs and MP4s are supported today. If it's a PowerPoint or Word doc, export it to PDF first and it'll go right in.
The agent answered something poorly in testing. Usually one of three fixes: check the labeled regions on that page in Step 5, add a supporting asset in Step 4 so it has the source material, or tighten your Special Agent Instructions.
FAQ
Can I add more than one Talkable to a demo? Yes — attach as many as the experience needs.
Can I edit a Talkable after it's published? Yes, and existing links keep working. If you want it offline while you work, flip it to Draft.
Can buyers get back to the demo from the Talkable? Yes — buyers can navigate back to the DemoBoard they came from.
Where do the leads go? Every entry-form submission and conversation shows up in AI Conversations, tied to the buyer's session and engagement history.
Related Articles
Engagement Insights · How to Create Public Links for Marketing · Setting Up Consensus AI Connect (MCP Server)