The UNIfy chat holds a live connection to the server, and everything you send travels down it. When that connection drops, the assistant goes quiet. It reconnects on its own, so a few seconds of silence is usually the connection coming back rather than a message that has been lost, and a message you sent while it was down is held and sent the moment it returns.
The message you see only when reconnecting has failed for good is: "Unable to connect to the assistant. Please refresh the page."
What happens behind the silence
- The connection drops, for any of the ordinary reasons: your network, a laptop waking from sleep, a phone changing between wifi and mobile data.
- Anything you send in the meantime is queued, not discarded.
- It reconnects, waiting a little longer between each attempt, starting at one second and doubling up to a 30 second gap, for up to ten attempts.
- On reconnecting, the queued messages are sent.
It also reconnects when you come back to the tab, so a chat left in a background tab for an hour usually wakes up as soon as you look at it.
Only when all ten attempts have failed do you get the message asking you to refresh. If you are seeing it, the connection is not coming back on its own.
What to do
Refresh the page. That is the fix and there is no faster one. Your conversation is stored on the server, not in the tab, so refreshing loses nothing: the chat reopens with everything in it.
If it happens again straight after a refresh, the usual causes in order of likelihood are a network that is dropping, a VPN or corporate proxy that closes long-lived connections, and a browser extension blocking them. Try the chat in a private window with extensions disabled, which separates the last cause from the first two.
The message you typed
When you press Send, your message appears in the conversation and the box clears. If the connection was down at that moment, the message is queued and goes out on reconnection, so it may be answered a little late rather than never. If you refreshed instead of waiting, the queue went with the page: send it again.
When it is not the connection
Three other things look like the assistant not responding and are not:
- A reply that arrives and then stops part way through a task. That is the ten round ceiling. See the assistant takes at most ten rounds of work per message.
- A card sitting in the panel waiting on you. Nothing continues until you press Allow or Deny, and after two minutes it counts as Deny. See when the assistant asks before acting.
- A button that does nothing anywhere else on UNI. Covered in when a button does nothing.
If refreshing does not bring it back, contact support and say what you last sent.