Human takeover

Can I take over a conversation without the AI replying on top?

Yes. The moment a teammate replies, Eva stops writing in that conversation and its scheduled follow-ups stay frozen until somebody hands control back.

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Being able to take over a conversation without the AI replying on top is the first thing a sales team asks before connecting an agent: nobody wants to negotiate a discount and watch an automated message contradict what they just said.

The worry has precedent. A respond.io user wrote in a review published on G2 on 14 January 2026 that “the AI may respond again right after my last message”. That quote evidences what one person reported on that date, not a current defect or a comparison between products. Here is how Eva behaves, with its states and its limits.

Your team, one click

Take over this conversation?

Answer it yourself, or escalate so another team member handles it.

Yes, take the conversationNo, escalate to the team

Eva stays quiet until it is handed back

Your team takes the conversation in one click and Eva goes quiet.

Before and after

Today

The seller opens the conversation, replies, and has no idea whether the agent is about to write again. So they switch the whole agent off just in case, and every other conversation of the day goes unanswered while they negotiate one.

With Eva

You take that conversation and only that one. From your first reply Eva writes nothing more there, scheduled follow-ups are frozen, and the rest of your conversations stay answered. When you are done you hand control back, and Eva resumes with the full context of what you said.

How it works

1. Asking for help and taking over are two different states
Eva can request human assistance when your rule says so, and anybody on the team can take a conversation from the inbox without waiting for Eva to ask. While nobody has replied yet, Eva keeps helping the customer with information and preliminary quotes, and the actions that are the teammate's job stay blocked. The alert reaches the people you configured.
2. Your first reply switches Eva off in that conversation
The moment a person sends the first message, the conversation is marked as handled by a human and the agent is no longer invoked there: no crossed messages, no reply on top, no second alert to your team. Replying from the shared number or from the seller's connected personal WhatsApp has the same effect, and an unassigned conversation is claimed by whoever answered.
3. Follow-ups freeze, and return when you hand control back
During a human takeover the silence is total: no scheduled, running or parked follow-up fires, and none produces an alert. On handback Eva revalidates what was pending and coalesces it into one fresh evaluation instead of firing everything overdue at once. If the customer writes first, their message wins and supersedes the stale automated work.

Technical details

What Eva needs

Escalation configured on the agent, with the instructions for when to ask for help and the recipients who should be alerted.
Notification permission granted on those people's devices if you want the push alert, alongside email and the in-app notice.
Your team set up with active users, and a pipeline linked to the agent if you want the opportunity to follow the conversation owner.
The internal agreement to hand control back: Eva never resumes a conversation your team left taken over.

Good to know

Asking for help does not silence Eva by itself. While no person has replied, Eva keeps serving the customer with information and preliminary quotes; total silence starts with the first human reply.
Control must be handed back explicitly. While the conversation stays taken over, neither the agent nor its follow-ups run, however many days pass.
The API channel behaves differently: during a human takeover it answers with a conflict instead of returning an agent reply.
On Messenger and Instagram the platform opens a twenty-four-hour window from the customer's last message: if your team takes longer, it can no longer write on that channel until the customer writes again.
Freezing is not cancelling. Pending work is revalidated on handback, and Eva may decide it no longer applies, for example because you resolved the case yourself.
Notifications require configured recipients and permission granted on each device. Eva alerts, but it cannot guarantee somebody is available to take the conversation.
This page describes how Eva behaves. It does not claim other products lack human handoff, nor compare reliability between vendors.

+4×

online sales in six months

Serviacero Comercial, a steel distributor, multiplied its online sales more than fourfold in six months with Eva answering and quoting immediately.

Read the full story

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