Replio is now live. It answers your customers on WhatsApp — the channel small and medium businesses in this region actually use — and it lets you decide, per business, how much of that answering you are willing to hand over.

That last part is the whole product. Everything else follows from it.

The choice nobody wants to make

Businesses evaluating WhatsApp automation are usually offered two options, and both of them are uncomfortable.

The first is a keyword bot. You write rules, the rules fire, and the behaviour is completely predictable. It is also completely brittle: a customer who phrases a question in a way you did not anticipate gets the catch-all reply, and the catch-all reply is where goodwill goes to die.

The second is a full AI agent. It handles phrasing you never anticipated, which is exactly the problem the keyword bot has. But now an unsupervised model is talking to your customers about your prices, your refund policy and your delivery dates. For a shop where a wrong price quote is a real loss, that is a large amount of trust to extend to software on day one.

What we kept hearing is that businesses do not object to AI answering customers. They object to AI answering customers without them seeing it first. Those are different objections, and only one of them is about the AI.

Three modes, one switch

So Replio treats autonomy as a dial rather than a decision you make once.

Mechanical mode runs keyword rules in priority order, with an out-of-hours message, a first-contact greeting and a catch-all. It makes no model calls at all — not as a limitation, but as the point. When a business wants a specific sentence sent for a specific question, it should get exactly that sentence, and it should cost nothing to send.

AI mode runs an agent that answers from a knowledge base you fill in yourself — your hours, your shipping terms, your return policy, your FAQ. It replies directly, and it is told to hand off rather than improvise: when a question touches pricing commitments, refund approvals, or anything outside what it was given, it escalates instead of guessing, and the conversation is flagged for a human.

Hybrid mode is the one most businesses start with, and it is the reason we built this. The AI writes the reply, and then stops. The draft lands in an approval queue in the panel. A person reads it, edits it if needed, and presses approve — and only then does the customer receive anything. If nobody approves it, the customer receives nothing. The AI has no path to the customer that does not pass through a human.

The useful property of a dial is that you can move it. A business can spend two weeks in hybrid mode watching what the AI would have said, decide it is right often enough, and switch to full AI — or decide it is not, and stay where it is. Nothing about that decision has to be made before the first message.

Connecting your own number

Replio connects to the WhatsApp number the business already uses. There is no new number to print on the door, no migration, no asking customers to save a different contact. You scan a QR code from the panel, and messages start appearing in the conversation view.

We should be precise about how that works today, because it matters. This connection is a bridge to your own WhatsApp session — it is not Meta's official WhatsApp Cloud API. That is what makes it possible to keep your existing number and be running in a few minutes. It also means it is an unofficial route, with the risks that come with one, and Replio says so in the panel and in its footer rather than in a footnote. The official route exists too. Replio also ships a driver for Meta's WhatsApp Cloud API, written and verified against real credentials rather than sketched against the documentation — and it is a second driver rather than a migration: the bridge and the official API are designed to live side by side, with each business recording which transport it uses so that its message history stays honest about how each message travelled. Today the bridge is the default and the one you get by scanning a QR code; the official path is not yet self-service, and moving a business onto it is something we do with you rather than something you switch on alone.

The parts around the edges

The response engine is the interesting half; the other half is the unglamorous work that decides whether a support tool survives contact with a real business.

Business hours are interpreted properly, including ranges that cross midnight — a shop open until 02:00 is a normal shop, not an edge case — and the out-of-hours message is sent once per customer per day rather than on every message. Scheduled messages let you queue a reply for later. Broadcast campaigns send to a segment rather than to everyone. Every outgoing message, whatever produced it, goes through one exit point, so a message sent from the panel, from the phone, from a rule and from the AI all land in the same conversation history with their origin recorded.

Data requests are handled as a first-class feature rather than a promise. If a customer asks what you hold on them, or asks to be forgotten, there is a command that exports or erases everything tied to that phone number for that business — messages, AI drafts, scheduled messages — in one transaction, scoped so that one business's erasure request can never reach into another's data even when both have talked to the same number.

Who it is for

Replio is built for small and medium businesses whose customer support already happens on WhatsApp and has outgrown one person's phone: shops, clinics, service businesses, anyone answering the same twenty questions all day and losing the twenty-first because it arrived at 23:40.

It starts at €19/mo for mechanical replies, with AI and hybrid approval included from €49/mo, and a 14-day trial that does not ask for a card. Like every Talivio product, it signs in with Talivio Accounts and bills through the same Stripe setup as the rest of the portfolio.

If you have been putting off WhatsApp automation because you did not want to choose between a bot that annoys customers and an AI you cannot supervise — that is the choice Replio was built to avoid.