Appearance
How Rover looks and sounds on your site — looks, placement, greeting, mascot, voice, and motion. Every save goes live right away.
The Appearance section of your Workspace controls what visitors see and hear. Every control there is wired to a real setting — there is no staging step, so a save is the publish. Open your site after saving and Rover is already wearing the change.
Pick a look
One look colors the entire Rover experience — the welcome band, the chat bar, the live stream, and the open window. The gallery shows real captures of each look, not mockups.
| Look | Feel | Fits |
|---|---|---|
| Signature | Warm editorial glass | The default |
| Porcelain | Warm greige, pastel atmosphere | Calm SaaS, health, devtools |
| Gallery | Bone white, chromatic whispers | Creative studios, agencies |
| Noir | Obsidian and chrome, glowing cards | Luxury, fintech |
| Pop | Accent-tinted field, bold cards | Consumer brands |
Under the look sit three finer choices:
- Style preset — Signature (warm paper, serif voice, one accent thread), Noir (dark slate with a ghosted wordmark), or Playful (Signature warmth plus drifting orbs).
- Surface finish — Standard, Frosted, or Minimal. How translucent panels like the journey ticket render.
- Accent color — a color code from your brand kit: a hash followed by three or six characters. Leave it empty to keep the look's own designed accent.
Placement and launcher
Placement is where Rover rests on your pages. Visitors can still drag it to their own side — Rover remembers their choice.
- Bottom center (default) — the signature welcome band across the page foot.
- Bottom left — chat corner, clear of your page buttons.
- Bottom right — the corner visitors know from support chat.
The launcher form decides what closed Rover looks like:
- Auto (default) — a bar first, then the coin once someone has used it.
- Bar — always the full chat bar.
- Coin — always the small round launcher.
A placement set through the API — including top positions the picker does not offer — survives every unrelated save. Rover only writes placement when you change it yourself.
Greeting
The greeting is a first-time hello for visitors who haven't met Rover yet — up to 240 characters. Turn it off and Rover's first appearance stays quiet: just the launcher, no hello.
Mascot
The mascot is the face on the launcher. Three choices: Default (the built-in animated mascot), Your own image (an https:// image address — a square image works best), or Hidden. The shape can be round or a soft square. Switching back to Default clears any custom art.
- Mascot settings live on your site key, so they unlock once the site has an active key.
- The mascot is silent unless your boot config sets
ui.mascot.soundEnabled: true. After that,ui.mutedsets only the starting mute state — visitors control it from there. - Custom mascot video (MP4/WebM) is a boot-config option — see Configuration.
Voice and narration
These controls live in the Voice, narration, motion and advanced design panel at the bottom of the Appearance page. They decide what visitors hear while Rover guides them.
Voice
- Let visitors speak — turns the microphone input on or off.
- Voice language — such as
en-US. - Persona brief — a short description of how Rover should sound, like "Warm, concise product guide".
- Speaking rate — 0.7 to 1.5, where 1 is normal speed.
Narration
- Narrating guided work, captions, live-progress narration, and reading the final result are all on by default — each has its own toggle.
- Narrator voice — female or male.
- Interruption style — Normal, Patient, or Finish critical directions (Rover completes must-hear instructions before yielding).
Motion and spotlight
- Motion intensity — Calm, Balanced (default), or Expressive.
- Reduced motion — when a visitor's device asks for reduced motion, Rover can reduce it (default) or remove it entirely.
- Performance budget — Standard, or High-performance pages.
- Action spotlight — on by default. Dims everything except the element Rover is actively guiding. The spotlight color takes a three- or six-digit color code (default
#C6F24E). - Dim the page behind Rover — on by default; an optional blur is off by default.
- File attachments — off by default; turn it on to let visitors attach files.
The same panel holds moment cards — images Rover shows on the proactive card and at opening, checkpoint, and closing moments of a run. Up to 12 images, each an https:// address with its own id. No uploads in this version.
Where Rover appears at all
Visibility has one home: the Install section's Show Rover to card. Three modes:
- Everywhere — every page, every visitor.
- Only signed-in visitors — Rover stays hidden until your site says who signed in. The one-line identity call lives in Audience.
- Choose pages — a "Show Rover on" list and a "Never on" list, one path per line like
/pricingor/admin, up to 20 lines each.
Saves are the publish
Everything on this page is live configuration. Placement, greeting, and mascot save together with the look in one versioned transaction, so a retry or a closed tab can never leave visitors with a half-applied appearance. If a teammate saved first, Rover asks you to reload instead of overwriting them — your edits stay in the form. Advanced saves never move the page-top choices (look, preset, surface finish, accent), so the two save buttons cannot fight.