Right now there’s no way I know of to get imported characters to auto-reply. The only way for now is to use their shortcuts. You have to manually trigger them when it’s appropriate for them to speak. However, they should behave as you expect, otherwise.
If you’re using AI-Chat, you should be able to scroll down to the bottom of the screen and below “save chat, load, share”, there’ll be a button that says “Copy Chat Logs Without Summaries”. This will copy your chat in plain-text into your clipboard, and you can then paste it into a blank text file to save it.
Is that what you were trying to do?