Live Chat
The chat tab is where visitors reach you — one continuous conversation per visitor that blends instant AI answers, live agent replies, attachments, and ratings.
Overview
The chat tab is the messaging surface inside the Yaplet widget. It's where a visitor types a question and gets an answer — first from Vex, your AI assistant, and then from a human on your team whenever the conversation needs one.
Everything a visitor sends here lands in your Inbox as a single ongoing conversation, so your team always has the full history in front of them.
What's Inside
Messages & Media
The composer, attachments, file limits, how images and documents render, and the limits that keep the thread healthy.
Email, Ratings & Agent Handoff
How visitors reach a human, what happens when nobody's online, email capture, transcripts, and the rating prompt.
How a Conversation Flows
A typical chat moves through these stages — though visitors can stop at any point, and many never go past step two.
The visitor opens the chat
They land on an empty thread with your widget avatar, "How can we help?" and, in AI mode, the line "You're chatting with an AI assistant — ask anything." If you have an AI chatbot configured, the suggested conversation starters follow as outlined chips on the left.
Vex answers instantly
The AI replies in real time, streaming its answer word by word. In a single pass it searches everything the brand owns — knowledge bases, documentation sets, uploaded files, website pages we read for you, question-and-answer entries and the product catalogue — and it can show product cards or ask for extra details.
The visitor asks for a human
Either they request it themselves from the header menu, or a "Talk to the support team" chip appears under the last reply once the conversation has gone back and forth enough times. Vex can also offer to connect them.
An agent takes over
The conversation moves to your Inbox, the header switches to the agent's name and photo, and the visitor sees your configured reply-time expectation. If nobody's online, the visitor is told so and their message still reaches you.
The conversation is rated
The visitor is asked to rate the experience on a five-emoji scale and can leave written feedback — when an agent asks for it, or automatically when the agent leaves the conversation if Collect Ratings is on.
One Conversation Per Visitor
This is the most important thing to understand about the chat tab:
Everything a visitor ever sends you lives in that one thread. When they come back next week, they reopen the same conversation with the previous messages still in place. A brand has at most one chat widget, so "one thread per widget" is in practice one thread per visitor per brand. For your team, it means the whole relationship with that visitor sits in one place — see Conversation History & Status for how far back that history loads.
Closing a conversation in the Inbox is an agent-side action for your team's queue — it doesn't erase or lock the visitor's thread. They can always reply again and reopen it.
Where Visitors Find the Chat
| Entry point | When it shows |
|---|---|
| Messages item in the floating dock | Always — the dock always carries Home and Messages, with a red badge on Messages for unread replies |
| The "Ask me anything..." card on the home screen | Always — it is a fixed card at the top of every home screen; typing there jumps straight into the chat |
| Quick-reply chips under the ask card | When configured on the home screen |
| The conversation row under the "Ask me anything..." box on the home screen | Only once the visitor has at least one message in the thread |
| Your own site | Your site can open the chat programmatically through the Yaplet SDK |
What Else Lives in the Chat
The chat tab isn't only text. Several other Yaplet features surface as cards and chips inside the same thread:
- AI chatbot and workflows — streaming answers, choice buttons, and guided data collection. See AI Chatbot.
- Forms and surveys — an agent or workflow can invite the visitor to fill in a form, which opens in its own tab.
- Knowledge base articles — links to your own knowledge base open inside the widget rather than in a new browser tab.
- Product cards — the AI can recommend products as a swipeable carousel.