The AI chat agent

What it is

The AI chat agent is a small chat launcher that sits in the corner of your website. A visitor taps the speech bubble, a chat panel opens, and the agent answers their questions in plain language, captures their details at the right moment, and books appointments if you have a calendar attached.

You set it up in the chat builder, which has three tabs: Knowledge, Behaviour, and Handoff. A live preview on the right lets you chat with the real agent in test mode as you make changes. When you save, you get an embed snippet to paste into your site (Copy embed code).

One important limit: chat is turned off on HIPAA-protected sites. If a site has HIPAA enabled, its chat embed serves nothing and the agent will not answer, because transcripts can contain personal information.

Teaching it your site (the Knowledge tab)

The agent only answers from what it actually knows about your site, so the first step is to crawl your pages. On the Knowledge tab, press Re-crawl & re-index. Sorraia reads pages from the same site you bound the agent to and stores their text as the agent's knowledge, then shows you how many pages were indexed, roughly how much knowledge that is, and when it last ran.

The crawler reads your pages' HTML — it does not run JavaScript. If key content on a page only appears after the page's scripts run in a browser, the crawler may not see it. It stays on your own domain, follows your robots rules, and covers a bounded set of pages, so very large sites are indexed up to a limit rather than exhaustively.

Anything not in your indexed pages (or your shop catalogue, which the agent quotes with exact prices) is off-limits — the agent will not invent hours, prices, or policies. You choose what happens when it does not know the answer: offer the human handoff, or answer generally and suggest contacting the team. Re-crawl whenever you change your site so its answers stay current.

Capturing leads and booking

On the Behaviour tab you decide what the agent asks for and when. Each of Name, Phone, and Email has its own timing, so you are never stuck with a form wall on hello:

• Ask after first answer — it may ask once it has helped and the visitor shows interest.
• Ask before booking — it only asks when they are ready to book or want a callback or quote.
• Don't ask — it never asks for that detail, and never even hints at it.
• It always answers the real question first, and asks for a name before a phone number or email.

Booking into a calendar

Under Booking on the Behaviour tab, attach one of your calendars. Once a calendar is linked, the agent looks up your real availability and offers a few genuine times, then books the slot the visitor picks — it never makes up times, and it needs their name and email to confirm. Only calendars on the same site are offered.

If you leave Booking set to none, the agent simply answers questions and captures leads. Its opening greeting and the disclosure line mention booking only when a calendar is actually attached, so it never promises something it cannot do.

When a person steps in

You can jump into any live chat from the Conversations page. When a team member takes over, the AI steps back and the visitor sees a note that a person has joined; from then on your replies go straight to them and the chat header shows it is now with the team. You can hand the conversation back to the AI, or close it, at any time — each of those also posts a short note so the visitor always knows who they are talking to.

If a visitor goes quiet, the agent checks in on its own. After a stretch of silence it sends a friendly "still there?" message, and if there is still no reply after a further wait it closes the chat quietly. The visitor can always start again — typing revives the same conversation. A live human takeover is exempt from this, so a chat you are handling never auto-closes underneath you. You control the timings and the check-in wording under Inactivity on the Behaviour tab (it is on by default).

The disclosure line and usage limits

Every chat panel always shows an AI-disclosure line at the bottom — something like "You're chatting with [your business]'s AI assistant · a human can take over anytime." This is enforced, not a setting you can turn off, and the agent will also confirm it is an AI if a visitor asks. It is marked Required · always on in the Handoff tab. The line always tells the truth in both directions: on the rare occasions no AI is running behind the panel, it says so rather than claiming one is.

To keep costs predictable and block abuse, each conversation and each site has built-in ceilings: a single conversation is capped at a number of messages and a token budget, and there is a daily limit on how many new conversations one site can start (plus a per-visitor rate limit). When a conversation reaches its limit, the agent closes politely and points the visitor to your team rather than carrying on unbounded.

Your plan also includes a number of new AI chat conversations each month — 25 on Free, rising with each tier, and unlimited on Custom. While you are on a trial you get the trial plan's allowance, not your current plan's, and it drops to your own plan's number when the trial ends. You can see where you are against it on the Billing page and in the Conversations header, both of which show the count and the date it resets (the count resets at the start of each month, UTC). We email you at 80% and again when you reach it, so it is never a surprise.

What happens when you reach it depends on your plan. On any paid plan your assistant keeps answering by default, and the extra conversations are $15 per 100 (or part of 100), added as a line on your next invoice — never a separate charge. You can switch that off on the Billing page, and there is a monthly cap on it too (10 packs unless we have raised it for you), so it can never run away. On Free, and on any plan where you have switched extra conversations off, new chats are not answered by the AI: the widget stays on your site and shows visitors your WhatsApp and email options instead. Either way, conversations already in progress are never interrupted — they carry on to the end.