Conversations

The conversation screen

Open a conversation from the Inbox and you land on three parts: a top bar, the thread, and the message box.

The top bar has a back button; the visitor — a dot on the avatar when they're online, their name (with a small icon for Facebook, Instagram, email or phone, or their country flag on website chat), and a line under it that can show Online, the name of the chat widget the conversation came from, and Unassigned or Assigned to you; a one-tap Resolve check icon, which resolves the conversation and takes you back to the Inbox (phone calls don't have it); and a ⋮ button. Tapping the visitor's name or the ⋮ button opens the details panel. The thread fills the middle of the screen, newest message at the bottom, with the message box fixed underneath it.

Reading the thread

Press and hold any message to open its sheet: Copy text, Translate to… and, on a translated message, Show original (see Translation). Tap a picture to open it.

Your own messages carry a tick underneath: a grey single check once it's sent, a blue double check once the visitor has read it. Phone calls and email conversations never show a tick at all — neither channel can report back that something was read, so it would otherwise sit on "sent" forever instead of telling the truth about it. A chat reply you also sent by email gets the tick too, because it still waits in the chat for the visitor; its bubble is labeled Emailed to … with the address it went to, and if that email bounced, a red Not delivered — the address bounced line appears under it.

Times appear only on the last message of a run, not on every bubble. A day header marks where the date changes, and a thin divider shows up wherever the conversation picks up again after a long gap.

Not everything in the thread is a message. Event chips mark things that happened — a page view, a session start, an agent joining or transferring, a rating left, a ban or unban. Chips with an amber ring are private events, marked as visible only to your team. Event chips always read in English in the app, whatever language your brand or your visitor uses.

AI summary and AI context panels appear the same way, always open, so you can read them without tapping. (An app that hasn't installed its latest update still folds older panels shut — tap one to open it.) AI context lists the sources it drew on; tap one to open the passage. Both panels are private, and generating them is covered in AI Tools.

Replying

Type in the message box and tap send — that covers most replies, but one thing about it matters more than everything else on this page:

While you're typing, the visitor sees a typing indicator — and it works the other way too: their own draft appears just above your message box as they write it, before they've sent anything.

Type / at the start of the message box to list your saved templates; keep typing to narrow the list, and tap one to put its text in the box.

Sending a reply as an email too

When the visitor has an email address, isn't on Facebook or Instagram, isn't currently online, and has been away for more than a minute, an Also send by email switch appears on its own line right above the send button. Email conversations never show it — every reply there is emailed anyway.

• Off (the default) — the reply only goes into the chat. Nothing is ever emailed on its own.
• On — the reply goes into the chat and is also emailed to the visitor, so it reaches them even if they never reopen the widget. It stays on for that conversation until you switch it off; another conversation starts with it off.

Switch it on whenever the visitor is unlikely to come back and check — you want the answer to actually land, not sit unread behind a closed tab. It never shows for a private note, and never for a visitor who's online right now — they'll see your reply immediately.

If an earlier emailed reply to the visitor's address bounced, the switch is locked and reads This address bounced. Emailing a reply is free with a paid plan or during the free 14 days; otherwise each one uses 1 bought credit. If the email can't go out — for example a sending limit was reached, or there is no plan, free day or credit to pay for it — the reply still lands in the chat, and the app warns you with Reply was not emailed.

Attaching a picture

Tap the + in the message box to open the + menu, then Attach photo. Pick one picture or several at once from your phone's library — or choose Take photo to use the camera. Each one shows as a small tag above the message box, with an × to remove it before you send.

Pictures can go out with a caption or on their own; either way, they send with your next tap of send.

Private notes

Above the message box sits a switch with two sides: Reply and Private note. Tap Private note and the message box takes on a different tint and its placeholder changes from Write a message… to Write a private note…: everything you write from then on is a note for your team, not a message to the visitor, until you tap Reply again.

The tint and the placeholder stay for as long as private mode is on, so it stays obvious which mode you're in.

What private notes are for, and who can see them, is covered in Visibility.

The + menu

The + button on the message box opens a sheet — everything you can do in a conversation besides typing, in five sections. Attach adds a picture (Attach photo) or takes one (Take photo). Yaplet drafts, summarizes, rewrites and looks things up for you. Insert pulls in a saved reply, a help article or a documentation link. Start launches a form or a chatbot workflow inside the chat, and is hidden entirely on Facebook and Instagram conversations. Settings holds Auto Translate. The Yaplet tools and Templates show only if your role includes them.

Each section gets its own page below.

When you cannot reply

Two situations replace the message box outright.

If the visitor is blocked, you get a red Replying is paused — this visitor is blocked panel. A manual block shows a Lift block button right there; a block that came from the dashboard's Security system shows no button and points you to manage it there instead. Blocking and unblocking are covered in Conversation Actions.

If the conversation itself fails to load, you get This conversation could not be loaded with a Try again button — rather than a message box that looks normal but silently does nothing.

A phone call replaces the message box too, but with the call's recordings instead of a warning — there's no way to reply to a call from the app. See Phone Calls.

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