Customizable UI for your AI Agent with Kipps.AI APIs
Build a fully customizable UI for your AI agent using Kipps.AI APIs. Integrate chat, voice, or WhatsApp agents into any platform with headless architecture.
Introduction
Most AI agent platforms hand you a chat widget and expect you to live inside it — a fixed bubble in the corner of the screen, a fixed color scheme, a fixed conversation layout. That's fine for a quick deployment, but it breaks down the moment your product has its own design system, its own mobile app, or its own idea of what a "conversation" should look like.
Headless Kipps.AI solves this by separating the two halves of an AI agent: the intelligence layer (natural language understanding, knowledge retrieval, conversation memory, escalation logic) and the presentation layer (the UI the end user actually sees and taps on). You keep building your agent's brain inside Kipps.AI — training it, tuning its prompts, connecting it to your CRM or knowledge base — and you connect that brain to an interface you build and fully control, using the Kipps.AI API.
This guide is for developers and product teams who want an AI agent's capabilities without inheriting a vendor's UI opinions. If you're happy embedding a standard chat widget on your site, you likely don't need the headless path — Kipps.AI's default embeddable widget is faster to ship and requires no engineering effort. Reach for the headless API instead when your product has its own design system a third-party widget would clash with, when you're building a native iOS or Android app that needs the conversation to feel native rather than like a web view, when you want to route agent responses into a non-chat interface (a kiosk, a dashboard, a voice-only device), or when you need finer control over rendering and retries than a drop-in widget exposes.
Before You Start: Prerequisites
Before generating an API key, make sure you have:
- A Kipps.AI account with at least one agent already created and configured (persona, knowledge base, and any integrations you plan to use). The headless API talks to an existing agent — it doesn't create one for you.
- A developer or engineering resource comfortable making authenticated HTTP requests and handling JSON responses. The headless path assumes you're building a UI from scratch, which is inherently a coding task.
- A plan for where the API key lives. Because the key authenticates requests to your agent, it should be stored server-side (an environment variable, a secrets manager) rather than shipped inside client-side JavaScript or a mobile app bundle, where it could be extracted.
- Clarity on your target surface — web, iOS, Android, or something else — since that determines which SDK, framework, or native networking layer you'll use to call the API.
How to Get Started
Generating your API credentials takes a few minutes. Here's the full walkthrough.
Step 1: Log in or sign up
Log in to your Kipps.AI account, or create one if you're starting fresh. If you haven't built an agent yet, do that first — configure its persona, connect its knowledge base, and test it inside the standard Kipps.AI interface before you start building a custom front end around it. It's much easier to debug a broken UI when you already know the agent itself works correctly.
Step 2: Open the API Key section
From your dashboard, click on the API Key section in the left sidebar. This is the control panel for everything related to programmatic access to your agents.
Step 3: Create your API key
Click Create API Key to generate a new credential. Give it a name that reflects where it will be used (for example, "production-web-app" or "ios-staging") if the platform allows labeling — this matters more than it seems once you have multiple integrations and need to know which key belongs to which surface.
Step 4: Copy and store the key securely
Your API key is now generated. Copy it immediately and store it somewhere safe — a .env file that's excluded from version control, or your team's secrets manager. Then close the dialog.
Treat this key the way you'd treat a database password. Anyone holding it can send requests to your agent on your behalf and, depending on your plan, consume your usage quota. If a key is ever exposed — committed to a public repo, logged in plaintext, or bundled into a client app — regenerate it and update every service that uses it.
Step 5: Build against the API
With your key in hand, your application server sends requests to the Kipps.AI API, passing the key for authentication along with the user's message and any relevant context (conversation ID, user identifiers, prior turns). The API returns the agent's response, which your front end then renders however you like — as chat bubbles, as a voice transcript, as structured cards, or as anything else your UI calls for.
Because the response comes back as data rather than pre-rendered HTML, you're free to build the actual interaction however fits your product: streaming text token-by-token, showing typing indicators, attaching custom UI elements to specific message types, or feeding the response into a text-to-speech layer for a voice experience.
Step 6: Test end-to-end before going live
Before shipping, run through the full conversation flow your users will actually have — not just a single happy-path message. Test multi-turn conversations to confirm context is preserved, test how your UI handles a slow or failed API response, and test with the same knowledge base content your agent will use in production.
Troubleshooting
My requests are being rejected or returning authentication errors. Double-check the API key is being sent correctly and hasn't been truncated or had whitespace added when copied. Confirm it hasn't been regenerated or revoked — creating a new key invalidates the old one.
The agent's responses in my custom UI don't match what I see in the Kipps.AI test console. This usually means the two surfaces are pointing at different agents or different conversation contexts. Confirm your requests target the same agent ID you're testing against in the dashboard.
Conversation context isn't persisting between messages. If each message is being treated as a new conversation rather than a continuation, verify you're passing a consistent conversation or session identifier with each request.
Responses feel slow in my custom UI. Compare the raw API response time against the perceived time in your UI. If the API is fast but the UI feels slow, the bottleneck is usually rendering — consider streaming partial responses or a lightweight loading state.
My API key was exposed. Regenerate it immediately from the API Key section and update every service that references it.
Best Practices
- Never expose your API key client-side. Route requests through your own backend so the key stays server-side, even for a mobile app.
- Version your prompts and knowledge base changes separately from your UI releases. Since the layers are decoupled, track which agent configuration was live for which UI version, especially when debugging a user-reported issue later.
- Design for failure states, not just the happy path. Build in retries, timeouts, and a graceful fallback message so a failed API call doesn't look like a broken app.
- Keep a lightweight staging environment to test UI changes against a non-production agent before pointing your live app at prompt or knowledge base changes.
- Log conversation IDs on your side, not just message content, so you can trace a session end-to-end if something goes wrong.
Use Cases
- Custom Web Interfaces: Embed an AI agent in your web app with full control over layout, branding, and user flow.
- Native Mobile Apps: Integrate voice or chat agents into iOS and Android apps using native UI frameworks.
- Internal Tools: Use Kipps agents within custom enterprise systems for support, automation, or workflow guidance.
- IoT & Embedded Devices: Enable conversational experiences in devices with minimal UI requirements.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes — you'll need to write code to call the API and render its responses. If you want an agent live on your site without engineering effort, use Kipps.AI's standard embeddable widget instead.
Yes. Many teams start with the embeddable widget for a fast launch and move specific surfaces — a mobile app, a redesigned support page — to the headless API later.
No. Your agent's persona, knowledge base, and integrations are still configured inside Kipps.AI exactly as usual. Headless only changes how the response is delivered and rendered.
You can generally create separate keys per environment or surface (staging, production), which is good practice — it lets you revoke access to one surface without disrupting others.
It works for any agent type Kipps.AI supports. Since the API returns the response as data, you can feed it into a text-to-speech layer for voice just as easily as rendering it as chat text.
The Headless Kipps.AI Agent is built for teams who need the power of a trained AI agent without inheriting someone else's design decisions. Design your own front end — web, mobile, voice, or something entirely custom — while Kipps.AI handles the intelligence behind the scenes.
Ready to build a headless agent for your product? Talk to our team or explore the full platform at kipps.ai.
