Every message you send from chat carries a name, and you get to choose which one. You can post under your own name, post as Viki, or post as a shared persona like Dispatch that several teammates staff together. Drivers see one consistent contact; your team still sees exactly who typed it.
Picking an identity in the composer
Next to the Send button there's a small arrow that opens the Send as menu. The first option is always Yourself — "Posts under your name." What follows depends on where you're typing.
In a driver's conversation (the ones grouped under Viki Conversations in the sidebar), the second option is Viki, labeled "AI voice agent identity." In a company channel, the menu instead lists your company's personas, each with its member count.
Once you pick something other than yourself, a Sending as [name] pill appears above the composer and stays there until you change it — the menu says as much: "Stays selected until you change it. Send when you're ready." Click the small x on the pill to go back to sending as yourself.
One thing worth untangling: on a driver's conversation there is a second control also labeled "Send as," the Chat / SMS toggle that chooses how the message is delivered. That one picks the delivery method; the arrow beside Send picks the identity. If you switch to SMS, the identity picker disappears entirely — a text already goes out from your company's Viki line, so there is nothing left to choose.
What the driver actually sees
Send as yourself and the driver sees your name. Send as Viki and the message arrives from Viki instead of from you. Send as a persona and it arrives under the persona's name — that's why the name field on a persona says "Drivers see this name as one consistent contact."
What drivers never see is who was behind it. Your teammates, viewing the same conversation in the manager app, get a small · sent by [name] note on any message posted as Viki or as a persona. Push notifications work the same way: a manager's alert reads "Alex As Dispatch," while the driver's just says Dispatch. A persona's description field is internal too — "Internal only — drivers never see this."
Personas and their own threads
Personas live in the Personas section of the conversation list. Hover a persona for a gear ("Manage persona") that opens the personas manager, or the plus ("New message as [persona]") to start a thread with a driver. You can also open New and use the As persona tab, which walks you through picking the persona and then the driver.
Inside one of those persona threads the identity is locked to that persona — the pill has no x, because the whole point of the thread is that it's the shared line, not your line. Anyone on the persona's member list can pick it up and reply, and the driver never notices the handoff.
To create one, open the personas manager and use New persona: give it a Name (Dispatch, Safety, whatever your team calls the role), an optional description, and a Team default read rule. Then add members from your admin list. Deleting a persona removes the shared line, and its members can no longer message drivers as it.
Settings that govern personas
Three settings matter. The team default read rule decides when a shared thread counts as read for the group: "When any member has seen it,""Up to a member's last reply," or "When I have seen it." Each member can override it on their own row, so one person can insist on marking things read themselves while the rest of the team shares.
Notification preferences carry a Persona defaults section with a row per persona, controlling both push and unread badges, and an individual conversation can be tuned further — a persona conversation lets you decide separately whether the participant or "Another [persona] admin" should ping you.
Finally, creating and managing personas is limited to chat admins; teammates on the chat-member tier don't see the As persona or New channel tabs at all. And you can only send as a persona you belong to.
When Viki writes on its own
Viki also posts without anyone pressing Send: automated announcements and follow-ups in driver conversations, quiet system notices when a channel's membership or settings change, and the alerts in your own Viki feed. Those messages carry no "sent by" note, because no one sent them.
Related: channels and conversations are covered separately, blocked words are caught by chat moderation before a message ever posts (and a blocked persona message is still recorded against the person who wrote it), scheduled messages go out later under whichever identity you picked when you scheduled them, and templates simply drop saved text into the composer.