Put a chat on the site only if it will stick to material the business already published and pass every other question to someone you named. The two refusals that matter are a made-up price and medical advice. A box that sounds certain while it is wrong will cost more than a page that stays quiet, because the visitor has no reason to doubt a sentence that arrived in your colors.
Demos are where AI chatbot for website work usually starts, and the demo will answer whatever you type. Yours should not. Write, before anyone pastes a snippet, the lines the chat may repeat, the questions it must give to a person, and which person gets tapped when that happens. Approval is a person opening those lines and letting them stand. An unread draft is not approval. We use AI for the part of the conversation that can repeat, and a person still has to clear a price, a time you promised, a discount, a change to the agreed work, or a new claim.
The chat has a short list of jobs it can do.
The useful work is narrower than a demo suggests. A visitor can be greeted. A question can be answered when the answer already lives on the site, in a file you uploaded, or on a menu that is current. The chat can collect what a person will need in order to continue, which is usually the service, the town, and a way to write back. A time can be booked only after a calendar you connected has actually released that slot. A slot the calendar never offered is not an appointment, no matter how polite the confirmation sounds.
Someone in the office has to be able to act the next morning, so the chat should leave more than a transcript. The useful record names the question, the answer that went out, and whether a person stepped in. Words with no next step sit there as a pile, and a pile cannot be called back.
Pointing at a next step is fair when the step is one you already use and it is true that day. If the office really does call on the following business day, the chat may say so. If the calendar accepted the slot, a booking confirmation is fair. If the hours on the site are today's hours, a summary of those hours is fair. A sentence you hope will become true is not a next step.
Chat is not the only door. Forms and phone calls are the others. When the thing going wrong is a form nobody opened, repair the first reply before a bubble appears in the corner. When the thing going wrong is a ring that died, read missed-call rescue. Presence on the homepage does not cover either of those misses.
Prices and medical advice stay off the chat.
A price the chat composed is not allowed. Repeating a figure is allowed when that figure is already on the site, on the menu, or on a rate card a person handed over. The number for this house, this visit, or this order is a different number, and it stays with the person who estimates. Discounts split the same way. An offer you already published can be said again. A bargain invented to stop the visitor from leaving is a new claim, and it waits.
Medical advice is the other hard stop. Symptoms, treatments, doses, and health results go to a person. Telling someone the time they already booked is not advice about care. Saying a product will treat a condition is. Shoppers at a dispensary ask what will help, which is how this line gets crossed. The chat may name what the menu lists. It may not promise a medical result. That question belongs to a person.
The chat also has to stop short of pretending someone already agreed. An arrival, a same-day visit, or a custom plan stays unsaid until a person has checked the board. And once a visitor asks for a person, the conversation is over as a chat. That request is complete. Keeping them in a loop after they asked is a refusal dressed up as help.
Questions about your own business should not be answered from the open web. Hours, services, and policies are in your material. Fill a blank with a plausible sentence and, soon enough, the site will be publishing a policy you never wrote. The visitor cannot see the difference.
Answers have to come from a file you keep.
Go live only after you have gathered what a careful new hire would need by the end of the first week. Today's hours. The services you really sell. The towns you actually cover. The questions the desk hears over and over. The lines you are willing to repeat without looking. If it is not in that set, it is out of bounds until a person writes it down.
Stale material produces a stale chat that still sounds sure of itself. Update the file, and only then let the chat read it. Do not expect the chat to absorb a change that was mentioned in the office and never written anywhere. A price that exists only in the owner's memory is not a source.
Some lines are the same for every visitor, and those are the ones that can repeat: hours, coverage area, a service you list, a rule for booking. Other answers depend on this customer, this address, or this complaint, and those wait. Either a person clears them, or the chat says it is handing the question over and then does hand it over.
Test the file the way you would test that new hire on Friday. Take ten questions from the inbox of the week that just ended. Where the file has no answer, the chat should hand the question off. Where the chat adds a fact the file does not contain, shut that path until the file is corrected. The extra sentence is the defect.
A handoff is a note with a reason on it.
Handing off means leaving a note a person can use, not dropping the visitor with a shrug. The note needs the question, the answer already given, and the rule that moved the thread. "Low confidence" will not help a busy desk. "Asked what this job would cost" will. "Asked whether this treats pain" will. "Asked for a person" will. Those are reasons someone can act on.
Decide who receives the note. One inbox is better than a message to everyone, because a message to everyone becomes a job for no one. The owner decides which questions can wait until someone next looks, and which ones should interrupt now. Write that choice down. A default you have not read is not a decision.
Templates repeat only after a person has approved them. A kind of question you have not seen before, an angry visitor, a fight about a bill, or anything that sounds like legal, medical, or financial advice still waits, every time. Keep the handoff visible in the record even if a transcript is also stored, so Monday does not require rereading the whole exchange.
Do not score the chat by how many threads it absorbed. Absorption can mean the visitor quit. The counts that matter are handoffs a person actually took, answers that matched the file, and bookings the calendar really held. Without those three, you cannot tell whether the chat helped.
Kyra answers the chat and the phone.
Kyra is our AI receptionist. She answers website chat from a widget on the site, and she answers the business phone around the clock in a natural voice. A call and a chat land on the same conversation record.
She asks for a name, an email, a business name, and what the person needs. She books into the connected calendar only when that calendar shows the time is open, and she reads the booked time back. Texts go only to contacts who gave SMS consent, and the team can review a text reply before it goes out. A price for a specific job, a clinical or legal question, or a complaint goes to a person.
Calls may be recorded. A summary is saved on the contact in the Conversion System AI-Powered CRM. You can call her now on +1 844 961 4399, which is our own line. We set Kyra up as part of a build. Reminder sequences, recall lists, and a board built around your desk are separate jobs. They belong with the systems around the office, not inside the widget.
What counts as a promise is still a person's call. Taking a slot the calendar released is finished work. Quoting a job the site does not price is not. If the week is mostly forms nobody has opened, rather than live calls and chat, begin with speed to lead instead of opening a second place for messages to pile up.
Botender is built for one dispensary.
Botender is the chat for a dispensary. The notes below are the product site as it read on October 3, 2026. Read that site before you rely on a summary.
On the free plan, one dispensary gets 300 AI replies a month, and no credit card is required. Answers come from the shop's website, from documents, and from Jane against the live menu. Takeover happens in a single inbox. Medical claims are not part of the product. The age gate starts on.
The install paths are WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Shopify, and Google Tag Manager. The chat sits next to menus from Dutchie, Jane, Leafly, and Weedmaps. Sitting next to the menu is the point. The menu remains the menu. The chat describes what that menu shows. It should not guess in place of the menu, and it should not attach a health claim the menu never made.
Set the boundary, with a person, before shoppers arrive. Names and availability can follow the live menu. A question about treating a condition cannot. Leave the age gate on unless you have a reason you would defend out loud. The default is the safer start. One inbox means the budtender who is on duty can see the thread. A chat that alerts no one is a menu you have muted.
A post that implies a medical result is a publishing problem, not a chat problem. Hold that post for a person. The widget does not make the caption safe by being nearby.
A build fits when the product does not.
Kyra is the choice when you want the phone, the website chat, and a booked time handled together. Botender is the choice when you want dispensary chat on a live menu, a person in one inbox, and no medical claims. A build around either one is the choice when the job is particular to you and the product does not already do it.
The refusals do not loosen because you chose a build. The file is still the source. A price for this job still waits. Medical advice still waits. Templates still need a person's approval, and exceptions still go to that person. The record still shows the handoff. You are not paying for a warmer way to invent what the file does not say.
A connector you assemble yourselves is a weak fit for a visitor who is on the site right now. Dropping a transcript into a sheet does not answer them. Replying with a price assembled from two matching fields is worse. Customer-facing chat needs a list that waits and a refusal when the answer is not allowed. A notification that something arrived is not that list.
Score the conversations before you pick a path. How often they happen, how long they hold the desk, what a wrong answer costs, and whether a customer is waiting are the four marks. The automation guide walks through that score. If the winning row is a missed call or a form left unread, do that job before this one. Chat on top of an inbox nobody watches is a second place to miss the same person.
Pick the next page from the job you have.
When chat really is the job, read the Kyra page or the Botender site for the matching product, and write the handoff rules before the snippet goes on the page. When the job is the first answer to a form or a text, read speed to lead and the first-reply guide. When you are still deciding which job hurts, begin with the automation guide and the systems list.
The small-business guide sets chat beside quotes, reminders, and the Monday note an owner can read. Learn from one kind of conversation, with a person named for the handoff. Add another kind only after the first kind has a count you trust.