An AI chatbot that answers from your own content, with human handoff

A business chatbot is useful when it answers the repetitive questions from your own content (price lists, opening hours, policies, product details) and quietly passes everything else to a human. It is not a replacement for staff. The part that decides whether it works is the handoff, not the AI model.

What it looks like in practice

A visitor opens a chat bubble on your site, or messages you on a chat channel, and asks “Do you deliver to my area?” The bot looks up the relevant passages from your documents, writes a short answer, and shows where in your content it came from. If the passages do not cover the question, it says so and offers to send the conversation to you.

On your side there is a simple inbox: each conversation, the bot’s answer, the source passages it used, and a button to take over. When a person replies, the bot stops talking in that thread so the customer never gets two voices.

How I build it

• Content intake. I load your FAQ, price list, policy pages, PDFs and past email answers. Each is split into chunks and indexed so the bot can retrieve the right ones for a question.
• Answer rules. The bot is told to answer only from retrieved content, keep answers short, and never quote a price or promise a date that is not in the material.
• Handoff triggers. A person is pulled in when the bot cannot find a source, when the customer asks for a human, when words like refund, complaint or cancel appear, or when the customer repeats a question twice.
• Notifications. A handoff sends you an email or message with the full conversation, so you do not start from zero.
• Logging. Every question and answer is stored so you can see what customers ask and which answers need fixing in your content.

Limits I will tell you up front

• It can be wrong or give a vague answer, especially when your documents contradict each other. Cleaning the source content is half the work.
• It does not know anything that is not in the material, including today’s stock or a customer’s order, unless I connect it to a system that has an API.
• It should not give legal, medical or financial advice. I add a fixed disclaimer and a handoff for those topics.
• Messaging platforms such as WhatsApp have their own rules for business messaging. Confirm those against the platform docs.

When a ready-made chatbot is the better choice

If your content is a handful of pages and you only need a bubble on a site, a hosted chatbot product may be enough and cheaper to run. Custom work pays off when you need your own handoff rules, your own inbox, a connection to your booking or order system, or control over where customer data is stored.

For approval-first replies by email instead of live chat, see the related post on drafting replies with a human in the loop.

What I need from you

• Your documents in whatever state they are in (I help tidy them).
• A list of the ten questions customers ask most, and ten you never want the bot to answer.
• Who should receive handoffs, and during what hours.
• Access to your website or the chat account it should connect to.

I test on real past questions, show you where it fails, and fix the content or rules before it faces customers.