FAQ: Turn AI features off

How to pause Quinn and Copilot on Cloud or self-hosted, and how a self-hosted install switches off all AI or single features with environment variables.

Yes, you can pause Quinn and Copilot at any time on Cloud and self-hosted, and a self-hosted install can switch off every AI feature, or individual ones, with environment variables. This FAQ explains each option.

Pause Quinn (Cloud and self-hosted)

Agent: go to Admin > Settings > Agent and click Pause Agent. Quinn stops replying in Messenger, and customer messages wait for your team in the inbox. Your configuration is kept, and Resume brings it back.
Copilot: go to Admin > Settings > Copilot and click Pause Copilot. Teammates no longer see Copilot in the inbox.

Feedback AI on Cloud

On Quackback Cloud, post summaries, duplicate detection and AI suggestions run automatically on paid plans. There is no workspace setting to switch them off. The Free plan has no AI features.

Switch AI off on a self-hosted install

AI is off until you configure it. To keep it off, don't set the AI variables. To turn off AI you already configured:

Everything: remove OPENAI_API_KEY (or OPENAI_BASE_URL) from your environment and restart Quackback. Every AI feature, including Quinn, stops and its buttons disappear.
One feature: set its model variable to off, then restart. For example:

AI_SUMMARY_MODEL="off"     # no post summaries
AI_ASSISTANT_MODEL="off"   # no Quinn
AI_EMBEDDING_MODEL="off"   # no embeddings: duplicate detection and semantic search stop

The full list of per-feature variables is in Configure AI features.

Note: Without embeddings, help center search falls back to keyword matching. It still works, but it won't match synonyms or natural-language questions.

Where AI data goes when it's on

On a self-hosted install, AI requests go only to the endpoint you configured in OPENAI_BASE_URL, which can be a model server you run yourself. See Configure AI features.