How conversation availability works

Understand how the Convai Unity SDK decides whether a character can hear the player, and why a connected room is not enough.

A room can report itself connected before the character the player is addressing has been announced by Convai. Conversation availability answers a narrower question than "is the room connected" — it asks "can this specific character hear the player right now" — and it is what every input surface in the SDK checks before it lets the player speak or type.

Why connected is not the same as available

A room reporting connected says nothing about whether the character being addressed has been confirmed by the service yet. A greeting typed in that gap is accepted, sent, and lost — nothing logs it, and nothing tells the player why nobody answered. ConvaiManager.ConversationAvailability closes that gap. Bind input to it instead of to whether the room is connected.

The states, in lifecycle order

ConvaiManager.ConversationAvailability returns a ConvaiConversationAvailability value:

State	Meaning
NoCharacter	No character is being addressed, or the scene is not set up yet.
Offline	There is no room. Nothing is listening.
Connecting	The room is being established.
Preparing	The room is connected, but this character has not been confirmed by the service yet. A message sent now is lost.
Ready	The character can hear the player.
Answering	The character is answering. Input is still accepted — interrupting a character mid-answer is ordinary conversation, not a rejected message.
Unavailable	The character failed to start, or left the room. Unlike Connecting and Preparing, this does not resolve on its own.

Do not compare these values with < or >. Ready and Answering are the two states that accept player input, and they are not adjacent in the list.

Which question to ask

Two extension methods answer the questions a UI actually has:

• CanAcceptPlayerInput() — whether a message sent now, typed or spoken, reaches the character. True only for Ready and Answering.
• IsSettling() — whether the state resolves on its own without telling the player to do anything. True only for Connecting and Preparing.

Who is being asked

ConvaiManager.ConversationAvailability answers for ConvaiManager.AddressedCharacter — whichever character the player is currently talking to, whether or not the room keeps a roster for several characters. The same answer is also available per character on ConvaiCharacter.ConversationAvailability.

ConvaiCharacter.ConversationAvailability sits next to ConvaiCharacter.IsCharacterReady, and the two are easily confused. IsCharacterReady is set once by the character-ready signal from Convai and does not clear on its own. ConversationAvailability also accounts for whether the room is connected, whether the character still holds a seat in a shared room's roster, and whether the character is currently speaking — so a character can report IsCharacterReady == true from an earlier connection while ConversationAvailability reports Unavailable, because it no longer has a seat in the current room.

Moving through a target switch

ConvaiManager.ConversationAvailabilityChanged fires whenever the verdict moves — including when the player starts addressing a different character whose availability differs from the one they left. While a targeting switch is in flight, availability reports Preparing even for a character that was Ready a moment earlier, so input closes for the moment the conversation is actually moving between characters rather than accepting a message that lands on neither.

Related concepts

Gate your UI on availabilityHow multi-character sessions work