AI Chatbot for Trello: a list that fills itself and empties as you work
Small teams do not need a ticketing system. They need one more column on the board they already look at every morning. Asyntai answers your website visitors using your own content, and the moment somebody needs a person, a card appears in Needs a human — with the visitor's own words on it. You drag it right. That is the whole workflow.
Get Started Free See the honest setupSee what the chatbot would answer
Enter your website and watch the AI answer questions using your own content — the answers that decide whether a card ever needs to be created.
Why a small team should put the chatbot on the board
Trello wins because you can see the whole of the work at once. Four columns, a dozen cards, and anybody on the team can tell in three seconds what is waiting and what is moving. Nothing about that survives contact with a support inbox.
Chat is worse than an inbox, because chat is invisible. A visitor asks a question the website did not answer, gets handed to a person, and that request lives in a widget dashboard that one member of the team remembers to open. There is no card, so there is no pile, so there is no sense of whether the pile is growing.
If a request is not a card, your team cannot see it. If your team cannot see it, it is not being worked.
Add one list to the board and the problem goes away. The chatbot handles the ordinary questions on its own — opening hours, delivery, sizing, whatever your pages already explain — and only creates a card when it genuinely cannot. What lands on the board is the exception, which is exactly the amount of support work a five-person team can hold in its head.
What the board looks like after a week
One extra list on the left, and the flow your team already uses to the right of it. Nobody has to learn anything.
The left-hand list is the only one the automation touches. Everything after that is your team dragging cards, which is the part Trello was always good at.
The four chatbot events, and the one you want
Asyntai fires four webhook events. You tick which of them a webhook sends. For a board, tick exactly one.
Resist the temptation to tick all four on day one. A board with two hundred cards on it is a board nobody opens, and the whole value of putting this in Trello is that the pile stays small enough to be honest about.
How to connect the chatbot to Trello, honestly
One thing first, because pages like this one usually gloss over it. Asyntai cannot create a card by itself.
An Asyntai webhook POSTs JSON to a URL and signs the body. It sends only Content-Type, X-Webhook-Event and X-Webhook-Signature. There is no field for a custom authentication header — and the Trello API wants a key and a token on every request. Something has to sit in the middle and hold them.
That something is a connector: Make, Zapier, Pabbly, n8n, or a small endpoint of your own. It catches the webhook and calls the card action with your credentials. Ten minutes, no code, and after that you never think about it again.
The four steps in full
Needs a human. Do not create a new board for this. The point is that the cards appear where people are already looking.Webhooks by Zapier trigger with Catch Hook. In Make it is Webhooks → Custom webhook. Either generates a unique address and starts listening. Copy it.Settings → API, add a webhook, paste the URL, tick escalation.requested and nothing else, and set a signing secret. Then open your own widget and ask the chatbot for a human, so the connector sees one real payload and learns the field names.Needs a human, then map the payload into the card name and description.After one delivery, the fields are mappable. In Make's expression syntax, where 1 is the webhook module number, a good card looks like this:
Put the visitor's own sentence in the card name, not a generic title. A column of cards all reading "New escalation" tells your team nothing; a column reading like real complaints can be triaged at a glance.
Two Trello workflows worth building first
Build the first one now. The second is worth adding once the board has a fortnight of real cards on it.
The self-filling column
A visitor asks for a person at nine in the evening. A card appears at the top of Needs a human with their actual sentence as the title and the session id in the description. Nobody is notified, nobody is woken up. In the morning, whoever opens the board sees two cards instead of zero, works them, and drags them to Done. The pile is visible, so the pile gets cleared — and if it stops getting cleared, that is visible too.
A card that arrives with a draft answer already on it
Add one more step to the same automation, before the card is created. Send the visitor's message to the Asyntai API and take the answer back. Then create the card with the visitor's sentence as the title and the suggested answer as a comment. Half the time the draft is close enough that the person just sends it, checks the card off, and the whole exchange took forty seconds.
Asking the chatbot from the Trello side
The connection runs both ways. Any step that can make an HTTP request can ask a question and get an answer drawn from your own published content.
Pass the same session_id each time and the conversation is understood as one thread rather than a series of unrelated questions. The full reference is in the API documentation.
What the Trello connection adds to your chatbot
Visible, not notified
No pings at midnight. Requests accumulate quietly as cards, and the column height tells you everything about how the week is going.
Signed deliveries
Every POST carries an HMAC-SHA256 signature of the body, generated from your secret, so a delivery can be checked against your account.
Answers from your own content
The chatbot answers using your own pages, documents and FAQ entries, so most questions never become a card at all.
30+ languages, one card format
Visitors get replies in their own language automatically. The card that reaches your board looks the same either way.
Butler still runs
It is an ordinary card, so every Butler rule you already wrote for labels, due dates and members applies to it without changes.
Two-way by design
Events out through the webhook, questions in through the REST API. One chatbot serving your visitors and your board.
What this actually costs
Three products, and only one of them is likely to be new to you.
- Asyntai. Webhooks and the REST API need a paid plan — Starter, Standard or Pro. The free plan gives you 100 messages a month to try the chatbot, with no API or webhook access. See pricing.
- Trello. Its own subscription, and its free tier is genuinely enough for this. You are adding one list to a board you already have.
- The connector. Make, Zapier, Pabbly and n8n all bill separately. An automation that fires only on
escalation.requestedis low volume by design, and normally fits inside a free tier — which is the practical reason, on top of the readability one, to leave the other three events unticked.
Trello chatbot questions
Can Asyntai create a card by itself?
No, and no honest page should claim otherwise. Asyntai POSTs signed JSON to any URL, but it cannot attach a custom authentication header, and the Trello API needs a key and token on every call. A connector — Make, Zapier, Pabbly, n8n or your own endpoint — sits in between, holds the credentials, and calls the card action.
Which board and list does the card go to?
Whichever you pick in the connector. A board holds lists and a list holds cards, so the Create Card action asks for both. Most small teams add one list called Needs a human to the board they already use.
Will the chatbot flood my board?
Only if you tick the wrong event. Send escalation.requested and nothing else. That fires when a visitor actually asks for a person, which on a small site is a handful of times a week. message.received is the one that would bury you.
Can a card trigger a reply from the chatbot?
Yes. POST to https://asyntai.com/api/v1/chat/ with an X-API-Key header and a body of message, session_id and website_id. The answer arrives in the response field, ready to add as a card comment.
What does it cost to run?
Asyntai webhooks and the API are on the paid plans (Starter, Standard, Pro); the free plan's 100 monthly messages do not include them. Trello bills separately and its free tier covers this. The connector bills separately too, though one low-volume automation usually fits a free tier.
Other ways to wire the chatbot in
The same four events and the same API work through any tool that can receive a JSON POST.
Give the board one more column
Build the chatbot, point one webhook at your connector, and the requests that need a person show up where your team already looks every morning.
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