I’ve been exploring the Triage with Persona option for auto-responses and noticed that when using thinking models with slower background processing, there’s no visual cue for users to know an auto-response is in progress. It would greatly improve the user experience if a processing indicator—such as “Thinking” or “Reasoning”—were displayed while the system is formulating a response.
Are there any plans to implement such a feature? I believe this addition would help manage expectations and enhance overall interaction.
I moved this to feature, I don’t think this has popped up before, but it is certainly an interesting idea.
We have a lot of internals to support this kind of feature and this can happen as well outside of responders, eg @mentioning a persona that allows mentions in a topic.
Any additional consideration for this Thinking visual queue when AI thinking is causing delay? I think this is good for the Discourse presentation. Instead of a user being unaware of delay or frustrated they just chill and wait.
Nothing yet, we did introduce something in chat for this in the past couple of weeks, but a placeholder on the topic is going to be much more complicated.
I guess a reasonably straightforward implementation would be to lean on “user is typing” notification we already have in presence and say something like “AI is typing” while it is composing the reply.
The current blue flashing dot indicator disappears when the AI starts to “think”. Is that the expected behavior? The indicator remaining visible and flashing would by itself be sufficient to show background activity occurring. It currently disappears during thinking and then reappears as the AI starts to respond on my Discourse instance.