Message grouping

Message grouping is how Inrō handles a contact who sends several short DMs in a row. Inrō waits until the contact has been quiet for 5 seconds, then hands the whole burst to your automations and the AI agent as one message. You answer the complete thought once, instead of replying to each line.

Why does a burst of messages need grouping?

People type in DMs the way they talk. A contact might send "hi", then "do you ship to Canada", then "price?" as three separate messages. An automation that answers each message as it arrives sends three replies to one question, and the first one answers "hi" before the real question lands.

Message grouping waits for the contact to finish, so your reply matches the question.

How does Inrō decide which messages belong together?

• Only messages from the contact are grouped. Your own outgoing messages never join a group.
• Each new message restarts the wait. The group closes once the contact has been quiet for 5 seconds (Inrō, September 2026).
• A group is capped, so a contact who keeps typing is not left waiting. A message past the cap starts a new group.
• Any reply closes the group. If an automation, the AI agent or you send a message in between, the contact's next message starts a new group.

What reads the group as one message?

DM triggers read the group, not the single message. That covers message triggers (keywords and any message), story replies, story mentions, ad referrals, ice breakers and the website widget. A keyword trigger matches on the text of the whole group, so a keyword sent on its own line still starts your flow once.

A flow paused on a wait for reply step receives the whole group as the contact's reply.

The AI agent for Instagram DMs gets every message in the group together, with the earlier conversation as history, and answers in one reply. If a scenario has already replied to the group, the agent does not reply on top of it.

Comments are not DMs, so they are not grouped: a comment-to-DM automation runs on each comment. Opt-out keywords still work on each message as it arrives.

Where do you see message grouping?

In the Inrō smart inbox, a thin grey line brackets the messages that were grouped. Hover over it and the tooltip reads "Messages sent close in time are grouped together for automations."

When a group starts a flow, its scenario execution shows the grouped text under "Triggered by". For the other terms behind how your automations run, see the Inrō automation glossary.