HelpGuides Chat Overview
HelpGuides Chat adds a support messenger to any website. An AI agent answers your visitors straight away, using only your published HelpGuides articles, and hands the conversation to your team when a person is needed. Your team works every conversation from a real-time inbox inside your HelpGuides project, on a computer or on a phone.
How it works
- You paste a short script onto your website. A chat button appears in the corner of every page that has it.
- A visitor asks a question. The AI agent searches your published articles and answers in seconds, with links to the articles it used. If you've set up actions, it can also look things up in your own systems, such as a price.
- If your articles don't cover the question, the AI says so instead of guessing, and offers to bring in your team.
- When a visitor asks for a person, seems frustrated, or the AI can't help, the conversation is handed to your team. You're alerted in Slack, by email, or on your phone.
- Your team picks it up in the inbox, replies, and closes the conversation. The visitor is asked to rate it.
Why use HelpGuides Chat
- Answers you control. The AI answers only from content you've published in HelpGuides. It never makes things up from the wider internet. Question rules let you decide what happens for particular topics, such as cancellations.
- AI first, people always available. Routine questions are answered straight away, around the clock. Anything the AI can't handle reaches a person.
- Watch the AI live. Any number of teammates can watch answers as they're written, and take over mid-sentence.
- Check before visitors see it. The Test tab runs questions through the AI and shows exactly what a visitor would get.
- Better documentation over time. Every question the AI couldn't answer is listed in your chat reports, and Topics shows what visitors ask about most. Write the article, and the AI answers it next time.
What's included
| Feature | What it does |
|---|---|
| Messenger | A chat button and window for any website, on desktop and phone. Visitors get Home, Messages and a Help tab for browsing and searching your help center. The chat follows them from page to page. See What Visitors See in the Chat Messenger. |
| Files and images | Visitors and your team can send screenshots, photos and documents in a conversation. Files are stored privately. See Sending Files and Images in Chat. |
| AI agent | Answers from one or more of your HelpGuides projects, with links to its sources, and hands off to your team when needed. See Configuring the Chat AI Agent and Chat Knowledge Sources. |
| Sales follow-up | When a visitor asks a buying question, such as "can I get a quote for 50 seats?", the AI answers and then offers a short name-and-email form so your team can follow up. Sending it hands the conversation to your team. |
| Question rules | Decide what happens when visitors ask about particular topics: hand off to the team, reply with an exact message, or answer following extra guidance. See Chat Question Rules. |
| Actions | Let the AI call your own systems while it answers, for example to quote a price. For signed-in, verified customers it can look up their own account. See Chat Actions. |
| Test tab | Try questions, save them as tests with an expected outcome, and re-run them all after a change. See Testing the Chat AI. |
| Inbox | A real-time workspace for your team: watch the AI, take over, assign, snooze, close, internal notes, saved replies and AI-drafted replies. Light or dark mode. See Using the Chat Inbox and Taking Over a Chat from the AI. |
| Visitors online | See who is on your website right now and which page they're on, and start a conversation with them yourself |
| Phone alerts | Install the inbox as an app on your phone and get push notifications for new chats, even when it's closed. See Using the Chat Inbox on Your Phone. |
| Notifications and teams | Slack and email alerts, routed to teams such as Support and Sales. In Slack, each conversation's alerts share one thread. See Chat Notifications and Teams. |
| Support hours | "We're back…" wording outside staffed hours, and an optional out-of-hours welcome. See Chat Support Hours. |
| Proactive messages | Start the conversation on pages you choose, such as your pricing page. A message can be limited to one of your sites, and can include the page's title. See Chat Proactive Messages. |
| Identity verification | Proves a signed-in user is who your website says, so their conversations follow them across devices and nobody can read someone else's. See Chat Identity Verification. |
| Reports | AI resolution and automation rates, response times and missed handoffs, busy times with a staffing plan, customer satisfaction, each teammate's figures, where conversations start, questions the AI couldn't answer, and Topics. Export every conversation as CSV. See Chat Reports. |
Getting started
Start with Setting Up Chat, then Installing the Chat Messenger on Your Website. To control the messenger from your own pages, see Chat Messenger JavaScript API. If something isn't working, see Troubleshooting Chat.
HelpGuides Chat builds on the same structured, AI-ready content that powers Model Context Protocol and llms.txt. If you're new to HelpGuides, Welcome to HelpGuides.io explains how to create and publish articles.