AI. Then a human, when it counts.

Nobody worries that an AI agent will fail to answer the easy questions. They worry about the hard one. The refund that is genuinely complicated, the customer who is already angry, the edge case nobody wrote a help article about. If the only exit from that conversation is a contact form, the bot has made the experience worse, not better.

Handoff removes that risk, which is why it is worth treating as a first-class feature rather than a fallback. The AI is not being asked to be perfect. It is being asked to handle the eighty percent that is repetitive, and to get out of the way cleanly on the rest.

Plenty of tools claim seamless escalation and then hand the customer a ticket number. The test is simple: does the person have to repeat themselves? Here they do not. A human takes over the same thread, in the same widget, with the entire conversation already in front of them. From the visitor’s side, the typing indicator just belongs to someone else now.

Your team works from a real-time inbox. Messages stream in over a websocket rather than on a refresh, you can see when a conversation was last seen, edit a message you sent too quickly, and mark a thread open or closed. Conversations arrive with the visitor’s country, browser and device attached, which is often enough to spot the problem before you have read the first message.

Human-only mode turns the AI off and leaves you with the widget and the inbox. This is genuinely useful in two situations. Some teams start here, run it as plain live chat while they build up their training data, and switch the AI on once they trust what it knows. Others keep one agent human-only for a sensitive queue, like billing disputes, while a second agent handles general questions automatically.

Because the mode is set per agent, both can run on the same site at the same time.

Human handoff is available from the Basic plan upward, and the number of team members who can staff the inbox rises with your tier. Additional seats are available as an add-on if you need more than your plan includes. See pricing for the current numbers.

One detail worth knowing: file attachments in a conversation are supported when a human is handling it, up to four files of 5MB each. That matters more than it sounds, because "send me a screenshot" is how a large share of real support conversations get resolved.