Topics is in early access. Sources, manual actions, and notification surfaces will continue to grow.
What’s a Topic?
A topic is an AI-generated grouping of related conversations about the same underlying issue, request, or theme. Each topic carries:| Field | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Name | AI-generated topic name (e.g., “Payment processing fails on iOS”) |
| Description | Optional elaboration |
| Type | Bug / Complaint / Feature Request / Feedback / Discussion |
| Status | Active / Stale / Resolved |
| Priority | 1–5 numeric scale |
| Categories | AI-assigned tags |
| Evidence | Conversation groups with full message threads |
| Participants | Customers and teammates in the conversations |
| Linked tickets | Jira / Linear / GitHub issues attached |
Lifecycle States
Topics move through these states automatically based on activity.| State | When It Applies |
|---|---|
| Active | Recent customer activity or a team response in progress |
| Stale | An unanswered customer message older than your stale threshold (default 240 min) |
| Reactivated | A stale topic that received a team response, returning to active |
| Resolved | Manually archived, all linked conversations closed, or no activity for an extended period |
How Topics Are Created
Topics ingest from Slack and Intercom — historical backfill on setup, live ingestion afterward. Each new or updated conversation is classified by LLM into segments; each segment lands in a topic via matching. You don’t manually create topics — they emerge from real conversations.Matching and Deduplication
BuildBetter prevents duplicate topics with a two-stage pipeline:Embedding pre-filter
The segment text plus its enriched context (speaker names, companies, channel) is embedded and matched against active and stale topic embeddings. The top 3 similar candidates pass forward.
LLM verification
The LLM verifier inspects each candidate’s name, description, source labels, and sample messages, then returns a confidence score. The bar is 0.6 with channel context present, 0.7 without.
The Tab View
The Topics tab in/triage lists active and recent topics. Each row shows:
- Title
- Kind badge — Bug (red), Complaint (orange), Feature Request (blue), Feedback (purple), Discussion (gray)
- Status badge — Active (green), Stale (amber), Resolved (gray)
- Description snippet
What’s Documented Here
Topic Detail
Conversation evidence, participants, linked tickets, lifecycle history, and the route/attach/promote actions.
Manual Actions
Split a group into a new topic, move a group to another topic, promote to a project, route with AI.
Sources & Settings
Slack and Intercom setup, channel purpose context, stale threshold and notification settings.
Linear Evidence Tracker
Tracked Linear issues receive evidence-backed comments that update as new customer signals arrive.
How Topics Differs from Clusters
| Topics | Clusters | |
|---|---|---|
| Source | Real-time signal feed (Slack, Intercom) | Embeddings-based grouping of historical signals |
| Refresh | Continuous (live) | On demand |
| Best for | Spotting fast-moving issues right now | Spotting durable themes over time |
| Inside Triage | This tab | The Clusters tab |