A
A2P — Application-to-Person messaging. Any message sent by software rather than typed by a human. In the US, A2P SMS over long codes requires 10DLC registration. Account — Your workspace. Everything else lives inside one: inboxes, contacts, conversations, teams, billing. Action — One call the AI agent made — a knowledge lookup, a read from your CRM, a write to your payment processor. Every action is recorded in a signed audit trail, which is what the resolution class is derived from. Agent — In these docs, always a person on your team. The software is an AI agent. The industry uses “agent” for both, which is why we don’t. Agent bot — A bot registered against an inbox through the API. Distinct from a Tied AI agent. See Agent bots. AI agent — The software that reads a conversation, decides what to do, and does it — bounded by the tool scope your plan grants. See AI agents. AMB — Apple Messages for Business. Branded, interactive conversations inside Apple’s Messages app. App Clip Code — An Apple Messages entry point. The customer scans a printed code or AR marker and a conversation opens. Useful on packaging, signage and equipment. Apple Business Register — Apple’s account and approval system. You register your brand identity, logo and colours there, and link Tied as your MSP. Verification typically runs four to six weeks. See Registering with Apple. Apple Pay (primitive) — The Apple Messages primitive that takes a payment inside the thread, authorised with Face ID. No redirect, no checkout page, no card entry. Approval chain — A requirement that a person signs off before the agent performs a given action. Recorded for governance and audit, and deliberately not part of any resolution class discriminator — switching one on never raises your price. Assignment policy — The rule deciding who a conversation goes to. See Assignment policies.B
Authentication template — A WhatsApp template category: one-time passcodes, two-factor prompts, login verification. Always charged, even inside the service window. Brand verification — Apple’s review of your identity, logo and brand colours before you can send on Apple Messages. Distinct from being live: verification is the identity check, go-live is a separate gate. BSP — Business Solution Provider. Meta’s designation for a partner authorised to send on WhatsApp. Tied is a direct BSP, meaning no resold infrastructure between you and WhatsApp. BYOK — Bring Your Own Key. Supplying your own LLM provider keys so you pay the provider directly and Tied never touches that money. Available on every tier. See Model costs and BYOK.C
Campaign Registry — The body that vets 10DLC brand and campaign registrations for US long-code SMS. Approval takes days and is mandatory — unregistered A2P traffic is filtered by carriers, silently. Carousel — An RCS primitive: a horizontally scrollable row of rich cards. A product list inside the thread. Carrier — One of the major US mobile networks. Each applies its own filtering and its own approval rules, independently — which is why an SMS can deliver to one network and vanish on another. Channel — The transport a message travels over — Apple Messages, RCS, SMS, WhatsApp, email, web chat. Distinct from an inbox, which is a configured channel. Channel fee — What it costs to deliver a message, as opposed to what it costs to resolve something. Billed separately and never blended. See Channel fees. Click-to-WhatsApp — A WhatsApp ad or Facebook Page button that opens a WhatsApp conversation when tapped. Opens the Free Entry Point window, making 72 hours of messaging free. Compliance instrument — An executed legal or audit artefact recorded on your account — a BAA, a PCI attestation, a SOX control attestation — without which the matching class of action is refused outright. The gate is the instrument, never the plan. Composer — The one component of an AI agent that writes to the customer. Specialists return structured data; only the composer speaks. This is what makes it structurally impossible for two parts of the agent to contradict each other in a transcript. Contact — One person, identified across channels. The same human texting you and later emailing you should resolve to one contact. Conversation — A thread of messages with one contact in one inbox. Carries a status (open, pending, snoozed, resolved) and a priority.
Corroborator — Evidence that a silent customer was actually helped: a read receipt, an opened link, a consistent system state change, or a next contact about something else entirely. Required for a Tier 3 resolution.
Credit — The unit Tied’s prepaid balance is denominated in, pegged at ten cents. Fixed, not floating. See Credits.
CSAT — Customer Satisfaction score. In Tied it is also a billing signal: a positive response is Tier 1 evidence, and a negative one voids a billed resolution retroactively.
D
Deflection — A question resolved without a human. Often quoted as a headline metric; Tied prefers resolution, because deflection counts conversations that ended rather than problems that were solved. Deterministic builder — The code that turns an agent’s intent (“offer these six choices”) into a validated channel payload. The model never writes channel JSON itself. See how the agent picks a message. Discriminator — The single mechanical test that assigns a resolution class. Evaluated against the action audit trail, not by judgement. A definition without a discriminator is marketing.E
Entry point — A surface where a customer can start a conversation. AMB has eight, including Apple Maps, Safari search and NFC tags. See Entry points. Escalation ground — The recorded reason the AI agent handed a conversation to a human. A closed set of seven, one of which — the customer asking for a person — can never be switched off. See Guardrails and safety.F
Flow — A scripted conversation path built on the chatbot canvas. Use one where determinism matters; let the agent handle everything else. See Chatbot. Form (primitive) — The Apple Messages primitive for multi-page data collection inside Messages: a splash screen, typed fields, validation, and a structured result. Free Entry Point window — WhatsApp’s 72-hour window, opened when a customer arrives via a Click-to-WhatsApp ad or Page CTA, in which all messages are free. Structuring acquisition around it routinely cuts WhatsApp costs 60–80%.G
Golden set — A curated list of real questions with agreed-correct answers, used to gate a publish. Grows automatically: every case worked through the quality queue lands in one, so a failure becomes a permanent regression test. Groundedness — Whether an answer is actually supported by the sources retrieved, rather than merely fluent. Measured separately from confidence, because a model confabulating an answer is not uncertain about it. GSM-7 — The standard SMS alphabet. 160 characters per segment. A single emoji or curly quote forces the message into Unicode at 70 characters per segment, which is the most common cause of an unexpectedly large SMS bill.H
Handoff — An AI agent passing a conversation to a human. Free — not reduced, not a routing fee, zero. And once a human messages the customer, that resolution is not billable at all. See AI-to-human handoff. HMAC identity verification — Signing a user’s identifier server-side so the browser cannot forge it, binding a web chat conversation to a real contact.I
iMessage app — The Apple Messages primitive that embeds your own app surface directly in the conversation. Also called an iMessage extension. Inbox — A configured channel: the channel plus its team, assignment policy, business hours and attached agent. You connect channels; you work in inboxes.K
knowledge — The resolution class where the agent answered from its knowledge base without touching any connected external system. $0.35. The cheapest class, and where most volume lands.
Knowledge gap — A question the agent could not answer, paired with the answer a human then gave. Captured at the moment it happens, because recovering the pair from a closed transcript is lossy. See the learning loop.
L
List picker — The Apple Messages primitive that sends a native selectable list. The primitive to reach for when a reply drives a branch, because it returns a stable identifier rather than only the label the customer saw. Long code — A standard ten-digit phone number used for SMS. Requires 10DLC brand and campaign registration. The most common originator for business messaging, and the cheapest.long_horizon_case — Work running for weeks or months across many conversations — a claim, dispute, or collections process. Billed as a case at negotiated milestones rather than as resolutions. Designated and priced under your Enterprise contract, on negotiated terms.
M
Macro — A reusable set of actions applied to a conversation. Distinct from a canned response, which is reusable text. Marketing template — A WhatsApp template category: promotions, launches, abandoned cart, re-engagement. Always charged. Message Suggest — An Apple Messages entry point. Apple offers a Message option instead of a phone number when a customer tries to call you — turning a support call into a thread. MRR — Mean Reciprocal Rank. A retrieval quality measure: when the right chunk is found, how near the top of the results it sat. Unrelated to monthly recurring revenue. MSP — Messaging Service Provider. Tied’s role in your Apple Business Register account. MT / MO — Mobile-Terminated (outbound, to the handset) and Mobile-Originated (inbound, from it). Carrier rate cards price the two differently.N
NFC tag — An Apple Messages entry point. The customer taps a physical tag — in store, on packaging, on a machine — and a conversation opens already knowing which object they tapped.O
orchestrated — The resolution class where three or more distinct providers were successfully written in one resolution. $1.90. Reachable at Advanced, not an Enterprise-only class.
Orchestration fee — The flat per-resolution fee set by the resolution’s class. One of the two numbers on your invoice; the other is LLM cost.
P
Pooled corpus — The anonymised, aggregated training data drawn across accounts. Anonymised tier only — raw data is never pooled, on any plan. See Evaluation. Portal — One published Help Center site: name, slug, branding, optionally a custom domain. Product catalog — A WhatsApp primitive sending single or multi-product messages drawn from a catalog you keep at Meta. Prompt injection — An attempt to smuggle instructions to the agent through untrusted content — a customer message, or a page it retrieved. Tied’s defence is structural before it is statistical: tool authorization reads account entitlements only, never conversation content, so a successful injection still cannot reach a tool the account does not hold. See Guardrails and safety.Q
Quality rating — Meta’s health score for your WhatsApp number, derived from customer blocks and reports. A fall here cuts your messaging limit and can suspend the number. Visible on the inbox’s Account Health tab. Quick reply — A tappable canned response. On AMB, thekey you send is not returned — only the label text — which makes the label your matching identifier. See Known limitations.
R
RBM — RCS Business Messaging, Google’s platform for verified business senders on RCS. RCS — Rich Communication Services. The successor to SMS, built into Google Messages, supporting rich cards, carousels and verified senders.read — The resolution class where the agent looked something up in a connected external system. $0.50.
recall@5 — A retrieval quality measure: how often the right chunk appears in the top five results for a labelled question. Reported as a number, not asserted.
Receipt — The per-resolution record showing the transcript reference, the signal tier and specific corroborator relied on, the class and its discriminator, the orchestration fee, the itemised model cost, and a one-click dispute. It is the enforcement mechanism for everything Tied claims about pricing.
Resolution — A customer’s problem actually going away, evidenced by a positive signal. Not a closed conversation, not a reply. Most conversations do not produce one. See What counts as a resolution.
Resolution class — Which of the seven classes a billable resolution falls into. Six are derived mechanically from the action audit trail; long_horizon_case is set in your Enterprise contract.
Rich card — An RCS primitive: image, title, description and tappable buttons in one card.
Rich link — The Apple Messages primitive for a link with a preview image or video. The only Apple primitive that accepts video.
Router — The cheapest model in an AI agent, running on every turn. It reads the conversation, picks the intent, and decides which specialists to call.
S
Sandbox — Talking to your agent as a customer would, against real knowledge and real connected apps, with writes disabled. All sandbox traffic is flagged as test and never bills. See Training studio. Segment — The SMS billing unit. 160 GSM-7 characters or 70 Unicode. A long message costs several. Service window — WhatsApp’s 24-hour period, opened by a customer message, in which free-form replies are free. Resets with every new customer message. Short code — A five- or six-digit number for high-volume SMS. Highest throughput, requires carrier vetting, and costs substantially more than a long code. Signal tier — Which of the four evidence tiers justified billing a resolution: explicit confirmation, system-verified outcome, corroborated silence, or never-billable. See What counts as a resolution. SLA — Service Level Agreement. Response and resolution targets, with defined behaviour on breach. See SLA policies. Specialist worker — One component of an AI agent, owning a tool subset, a model tier and its own test suite. Returns structured data to the composer; never writes to the customer directly. Suggested action — An RCS primitive offering a button that does something outside the thread: open a URL, dial a number, share or view a location, create a calendar event. Suggested reply — An RCS primitive offering tappable replies so the customer keeps moving without typing.T
Tier A / Tier B — The two tiers personal data is held in. Tier A is raw and scoped to your account alone, held in your region. Tier B is anonymised and aggregated, and is the only tier used for anything cross-account. See Guardrails and safety. Time picker — The Apple Messages primitive that offers appointment slots and returns the chosen one as structured data rather than as text to parse. Toll-free number — A 1-800-style number for SMS. Higher throughput than a long code and faster to set up — no campaign registry — so it is the choice when speed matters more than cost. Tool floor — The hard limit on which tools are ever loaded for your agent to see: only integrations you have connected and are entitled to. Enforced outside the model, before inference — a tool the model cannot see is a tool it cannot be talked into calling. Tool scope — What your AI agent is able to touch in your connected systems, set by your plan and your integrations and enforced at the point of action. Distinct from instructions, which shape behaviour but grant no capability. Typed commitment — A promise the agent makes as a typed field rather than free text — a refund amount, a date, an entitlement — which Tied validates against your real policy before anything is sent. The one control that makes a wrong model output harmless rather than merely less likely.U
Utility template — A WhatsApp template category: order updates, shipping notices, confirmations. Free inside the service window, charged outside it.V
Verified sender — Your logo, brand colour and verification badge on RCS, proving to the customer the message is genuinely from you. Version (agent) — A published snapshot of an agent’s configuration and knowledge. Every publish creates one and runs the evaluation suite; rollback is one click. See Training studio. Void window — The period in which a billed resolution can be reversed. 30 days if the same issue reopens; retroactive with no time limit for negative feedback. Credits post automatically.W
WABA — WhatsApp Business Account. Volume tier discounts accrue across all WABAs you own, never pooled across Tied’s other customers. Watcher — A rule that wakes the agent when state changes in one of your connected systems — a failed payment, a stalled shipment — so it can reach out before the customer notices. See Proactive outreach. Webview — An RCS primitive embedding a browser surface inside the conversation, so a checkout or a configuration step happens without leaving Messages. WhatsApp Flows — Multi-screen forms and workflows completed entirely inside a WhatsApp thread.write_financial — The resolution class where money moved. $0.95.
write_simple — The resolution class where something changed but no money moved. $0.70.
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Core concepts
The same vocabulary as a narrative rather than a lookup.
What counts as a resolution
The term that carries the most weight, in full.