The AI answers while the operator is away

A customer writes at 23:40 and the operator will see it in the morning. That gap can now be covered by a model — under rules you set.

Every chat has a window when there is nobody to answer: lunch, night, a meeting, a queue of ten conversations. The customer does not wait through that window — they close the tab and go to whoever replied. That is why Webchatix now has an AI responder: when nobody has answered for the configured number of minutes, Google Gemini writes into the conversation.

How it works

The countdown starts from the customer’s last message. Three minutes by default: a human usually still makes it in that time, and after that silence starts to read as “I am being ignored”. The reply lands in the widget, and operators get an “AI replied” card in Telegram with the same text — so whoever opens the chat a minute later does not repeat what was already said.

The robot does not replace people

An AI answer does not cancel escalation: the administrator is still alerted that no human replied. A conversation an operator has claimed is left alone entirely — someone is already on it. And as soon as a human message appears, the countdown resets: the next answer is expected from the team again, not from the model.

What the AI will not do

The main risk of any autoresponder is invented prices and dates. The model’s instructions are written to prevent exactly that: answer briefly, never make up cost, stock, delivery or discounts, give no legal or medical advice, never ask for card numbers. Anything missing from the context is something it does not know, and it says plainly that a colleague will confirm. Asked directly whether it is human, it says it is an automated assistant.

What to write before switching it on

Site settings have a field called “what the AI should know about the company”. Put there what your operators repeat twenty times a day: opening hours, delivery areas, return terms, what must never be promised. The more specific that text, the fewer “let me check with a colleague” replies — and the more useful the robot is at night.

Switching it on and off

The checkbox lives per site: Sites → gear → AI responder. The delay in minutes and the company text sit right next to it. One checkbox turns it off again, and every other setting is kept — so you can bring the robot back on the day you are short of hands.

What it costs

The API key is taken in Google AI Studio and set once per installation. It has a free tier that is usually enough for a small site; when the quota runs out the model simply stays silent and the chat works as before, with escalation and operator notifications. In other words, the worst case for the AI responder is exactly the chat you had without it.

How to tell it is doing well

For the first week read the conversations in a row — they are all in the dashboard, and AI answers are marked separately. Look for two things: where the model said too much, and where it helplessly deferred to a colleague on a simple question. The first is fixed by a prohibition in the company text, the second by adding the fact to the same field. After a few such edits, night conversations stop being lost ones.

What not to expect

This is not a salesperson and not a replacement for the team. The model does not know your warehouse, cannot see an order status and cannot grant a discount. Its job is to hold the conversation for the half hour — or the night — until a human joins: answer a routine question, acknowledge a problem, say that a colleague already knows. Everything else is still done by people.