Setup guides
Website chat
Put the assistant that answers your phone on your website as a chat: the key, the playbook settings, the code to paste, and what visitors can do.
The website chat is the same assistant that answers your phone, in a chat on your website. It uses the same playbook, knowledge, booking rules and guardrails, books into the same calendar, and says it is an AI in its first line. A chat shows up under Calls, marked as a website chat.
Setting it up takes three steps: a key, the playbook's Web widget tab, and the code on your site.
1. Create a key#
Go to Settings → Website widget and add a key. Only an Owner or an Admin can.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name | For you, not for visitors. For example "Main site" or "Staging". |
| Location | Which community the chat is for. Its playbook, profile and calendar answer the chat. |
| Websites allowed to use it | One per line, with https:// and nothing after the domain. https://*.example.com covers every subdomain. The chat does not load on any site not listed. |
Each key shows its public ID and when it was last used. Disable switches a key off at once without deleting it; Enable turns it back on. You can change the list of websites at any time.
Info
The website list is what keeps your assistant off other people's sites. If the chat does not appear, check it first: the browser's console says when a site is not on the list.
2. Turn it on in the playbook#
The community's playbook has a Web widget tab. Nothing appears on any website until Offer the widget on your website is on and the playbook is published.
- Let visitors type turns the chat on. Let visitors talk (click to talk) is not available yet; turning it on changes nothing.
- What it says first: the Disclosure (it must say the visitor is talking to an AI assistant, and a playbook with the widget on cannot be published without one) and the Greeting. Two more lines replace them when the chat on a caller's follow-up page picks up their call. You can also set the name shown above the assistant's messages.
- The button: its label (also what a screen reader announces), icon, corner, and whether the label shows beside the icon.
- Colours: light, dark, or following the visitor's own setting. Every pair of colours is measured as you choose, and a theme a visitor could not read cannot be published.
The Preview beside the settings is the real widget, drawn from your draft.
3. Put the code on your website#
Under Put it on your website on the same tab (or on the key in Settings → Website widget), pick a key and copy the code for how you want it to appear:
| Choice | What you get |
|---|---|
| Any website | A snippet pasted once, just before </body>, on every page. A chat bubble appears in the corner. |
| Your own button | No bubble: the chat opens from your own link or button, with AnswerStack('open'). |
| Inside a page | The conversation sits in a box on the page itself, for a contact or location page. |
| Tag manager | The same snippet as a Custom HTML tag, triggered on all pages. The widget sets no cookies. |
| React | The @answerstack/widget-react provider and launcher. It does nothing while rendering on a server. |
What visitors can do#
A visitor can ask questions, answered only from your playbook, knowledge and approved tools, and book a meeting under the same booking rules as a call. A chat has limits: a message can be up to 2,000 characters, a visitor can send up to 30 messages an hour, and a conversation up to 200 messages. A chat that has been quiet for 30 minutes is closed, and its record and summary are written like a call's.
Billing#
A chat is billed by the messages the visitor sends (the Chat messages meter), never by minutes or as an answered call. A booking made in a chat counts on the booked meter, like one made on a call. See Usage and invoices.