A chat on your website that answers from your own pages

The website chat in re:praesent is a small chat window on your website. It answers visitors’ questions using what you have given it: your website, your documents and a short description of your business. When a visitor wants a quote, a call back or a booking, it asks for their contact details and the conversation becomes an inquiry.

This feature is in pilot with our first customers. Ask us if you would like it switched on for your business.

The questions that arrive after closing time

A kitchen studio closes at six. People look at kitchens on their sofa at nine.

They have simple questions. Do you also fit worktops. Do you deliver outside the city. How long does an order take. The answers are somewhere on the website, on a page they did not find.

Some of them fill in the contact form. Many just leave. They were interested, and they had one question nobody was there to answer.

What the chat does

You teach it about your business. There are four ways, and you can combine them.

• Description. Two or three sentences on who you are, what you offer and who it is for.
• Websites. It reads the pages of your website.
• Documents. A price list or a brochure as a PDF or Word file.
• Text. Questions and answers you type in yourself.

The chat is told to answer from this material only. When it has nothing on a question, it is meant to say so and offer your phone number or email, if you have entered them, instead of guessing.

It replies in the visitor’s language. You choose how it looks and what it is called.

The setup is a checklist of five steps: connect your AI account, teach it about your business, try it, turn it on, put it on your website. The “Try it” step lets you ask what a customer would ask before anyone else sees it.

How a chat becomes an inquiry

When a visitor asks for a quote, a call back, a booking or to speak to someone, the chat shows a small card with the fields you chose, such as name, email and phone. Anything the visitor already mentioned is filled in.

A filled-in card becomes an inquiry, marked “AI chat”, with the conversation attached. You get your usual alerts, and it appears on the Today page with all your other inquiries.

The visitor can dismiss the card. It is shown at most once per conversation. A person who does not want to leave details can keep asking questions.

Reading what people asked

Every conversation is listed in re:praesent. You can read it from start to finish, and filter for the chats that became an inquiry.

The most useful list is called “Questions it couldn’t answer”. It groups what visitors asked in the last 30 days that the chat had no answer for.

This is worth ten minutes a week. Each question on that list is something your website does not explain. You can type the answer in right there, and the chat learns it within about a minute. Often the website should say it as well.

What it does not do, and what it costs

It is software that writes answers from text. It can be wrong, and it can misunderstand a question. We make no promise about how often it is right. Read the conversations in the first weeks and correct what you find.

It does not replace a person. It should not give medical, legal or price commitments that only you can give. Keep such things out of what you teach it, or state clearly that people must ask you.

The chat runs on your own AI account with a provider called OpenRouter. You pay that provider directly for what the chat uses. You can set a daily limit, and when it is reached the chat politely stops answering until the next day. Reading your website uses a second service, Firecrawl, and each page read costs a little there.

The chat feature itself is part of re:praesent at €300 a year or €30 a month, with no fee per user. It is in pilot, so ask us and we will set it up with you.

Questions