Common problems and what to check
The most common things to check when Charyl, your box, or your phone isn't behaving the way you expect.
Most problems with Charyl trace back to one of a handful of causes — a lapsed subscription, a search phrased too narrowly, or an update that’s still settling. This guide walks through the ones we see, symptom first.
Charyl’s chat isn’t answering
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Check whether the rest of the app is responsive
If pages generally, not just chat, are slow or unreachable, the problem is the box itself — see the box is on but the app can’t find it before assuming it’s Charyl specifically.
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Check your subscription
Charyl’s chat runs through Charyl Cloud, so a lapsed subscription leaves chat with no route. In the web app, Charyl tells you Charyl Cloud is paused for your home and points you to Settings to turn it back on. The mobile app shows a general error for this today.
Reading the error
In the web app, a used-up monthly allowance and a paused subscription each have their own message; anything else shows “that answer got cut off,” and retrying usually helps. The mobile app shows a general error for all of these today — retrying only helps if the cause was a slow connection.
Search over your documents comes back empty
Zero results almost always means nothing cleared the similarity bar for that phrasing, not that the document was never indexed.
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Rephrase, or be more specific
A search for “manual” might miss a document that would surface for “installation guide,” or for the appliance’s own name.
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Confirm the document is actually attached
Open the asset or record directly and check its document list. If it’s there, indexing worked — the search itself is just narrower than a full-text search.
Private records behave differently on purpose
If a document belongs to a Home Record you marked private, its contents never reach Charyl at all, even though the record itself still shows as existing. That’s the private-record boundary working as designed, not a search failure.
Something broke after an update
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Give it a few minutes
Updates are already health-checked for up to ten minutes after applying, and an unhealthy update rolls itself back automatically. If something broke and then quietly returned to normal, that’s this working as intended.
If none of these match what you’re seeing, the community board is the place to describe it — a report we haven’t seen before is exactly the kind of thing worth a fresh pair of eyes.