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Web chat overview

Web chat overview

You can use the web chat integration to deploy your assistant on your website or embed it as a WebView in your mobile app. The web chat integration provides an easy-to-use chatbot interface that can integrate seamlessly with your site, without requiring the time and effort that would be required to build your own custom user interface.

The web chat can help your customers start the conversation with common questions or tasks; it can display multimedia and interactive elements such as forms, and it can transfer customers to human agents for more help. A developer can customize the web chat to add even more capabilities.

Why use the web chat?

Building a custom user interface requires spending time and effort solving typical UI problems. For example, you need to design the layout and styling, keep up with browser changes, manage scrolling behavior, validate input, and comply with accessibility requirements. The time you spend building and maintaining a custom UI is better spent building a high-quality assistant instead.

The web chat widget uses cutting-edge functionality from IBM Design and Research to engage your users when they need help, answer their questions quickly and efficiently, and provide fallback options so there is always a path to a solution. The web chat is easy for you to deploy and easy for customers to use, it is secure, and it supports a wide range of desktop and mobile browsers.

The web chat is also customizable, which means that you can take advantage of the web chat functionality while still maintaining consistency with your website style and branding, adding custom UI elements, and integrating with external systems (such as live agent tools or CRM systems).

What you can do with the web chat

You can quickly deploy the web chat to your website (or even to a local test page) and see how it works. You can also use the web chat integration settings in the watsonx Assistant user interface to configure the web chat for your website and your customers.

If you are a developer, you can further customize and extend the web chat by writing code and using the web chat API. You can also use a WebView with a JavaScript bridge to add the web chat to your mobile app.

The following documentation topics provide more information about the capabilities of the web chat integration, how to configure and deploy it, and how to customize it.