Web chat puts a conversational assistant on your website. Visitors can ask questions and book an appointment without picking up the phone, using the exact same services, availability, and booking rules as the rest of FrontDesk. Your team can watch conversations as they happen and step in whenever a person is needed.
Web chat is a paid feature. It's available on Pro and Elite plans. Each plan includes a monthly pool of chat sessions (500 on Pro, 2,000 on Elite). Past it, the chat keeps answering and extra conversations are billed at $0.10 (Pro) or $0.08 (Elite) each; a trial stops at its pool. See Understand usage and overages.
Turn it on
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Open Receptionist → Web Chat.
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Flip the Chat assistant switch at the top of the page to Live. (This one saves right away; everything else waits for Save changes.)
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On the Behavior tab, fill in the basics under Greeting & tone:
- Greeting: the first message a visitor sees.
- Tone: Warm & conversational, Professional & polished, Casual & upbeat, or Brief & to the point.
- Assistant name: what the widget introduces itself as (e.g., "Sunny").
The assistant names the practice the way clients know it: the booking page's own display name when you gave it one, otherwise the location's Name clients see (Settings → Client Portal) or your organization name, never the location's own name. With more than one location it also knows which office the chat is for and says so when a visitor asks.
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Scroll to Guidance & permissions for the rules it follows: Custom instructions (pre-filled from your business type, editable anytime), the Fallback message it uses when it can't help, and whether it may collect insurance, let verified patients look up their appointments, or remember past conversations.
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Click Save changes.
The status line under the switch shows where the chat is answering, how many chats you've had this month, and what share were resolved without a person.
Decide what happens after hours
Under Behavior → After hours, choose what the assistant does outside your business hours (and on holiday closures), which are the same hours your phone AI uses after hours:
- Keep answering: the AI covers questions 24/7. Bookings still go through.
- Offer a callback: it answers what it can, then offers to book a callback for the next business day. The callback shows up in Tasks like one taken on a call.
- Take a message: it shares your hours and collects a message for the morning, which lands in your inbox with your other AI-taken messages.
Add an optional closed note (e.g., "We reopen Monday at 8am") and the assistant works it in. Visitors also see a small "We're closed right now" line at the top of the chat.
Make it feel human
The Human feel tab controls the pace of replies so the assistant reads as a person, not a script:
- Reply pace: pick Instant, Fast, Natural (recommended), or Relaxed. Each preset fills in the sliders below.
- Timing: fine-tune the read delay (the pause before the typing bubble appears), the typing speed (seconds of typing per 100 characters), and the minimum and maximum time the typing bubble shows. Moving a slider switches you to a custom pace; pick a preset to reset.
- Delivery: split long answers into a few bubbles like a person typing in bursts, set the pause between bubbles, and keep natural variation on so timings never repeat exactly.
The preview on the right replays a sample conversation with your current timing. Press Replay anytime. The greeting is "typed" the same way when a visitor opens the chat.
Watch live sessions and take over
The Live sessions tab lists every conversation happening right now: who the visitor is (once they've shared a name), what they want, which page of your site they're on, how the conversation feels (Browsing, Calm, or Frustrated), how many messages, and who's handling it (the AI, a team member, or Flagged for takeover).
- Click Take over on any chat. The AI pauses instantly, the visitor sees "Your name from Your practice joined the chat," and your replies send as you.
- Click Join to open a chat a colleague is already handling.
- Inside a conversation, Hand back to AI returns it to the assistant. Dismiss flag clears a takeover flag without taking the chat.
Flagging frustrated visitors
Under Behavior → Escalation, Flag frustrated visitors watches the tone of each conversation and flags the chat for takeover when a visitor sounds annoyed. Flag when someone asks for a person does the same when they ask for a real person. Choose who to Notify (the front desk team, admins & managers, everyone at the location, or no one) and they get a push and an in-app notification with an Open chat button.
Add it to your website
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On the Widget & embed tab, set the launcher text, accent color, position, and optional offsets, and choose whether to show your logo in the chat header.
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Copy the embed snippet. It looks like:
<script src="https://book.frontdesk.care/chat-widget.js" data-frontdesk-chat="your-slug" async></script> -
Paste it into your website just before the closing
</body>tag, on every page you want the chat to appear. -
Publish your site. The launcher button shows up in the corner you chose.
Try it with Preview chat
Preview chat, next to Copy embed code on the Widget & embed tab, opens the real widget in a new tab so you can talk to it as a visitor would. It works before you switch the chat to Live, and needs your online booking page set up.
The preview is a dry run:
- It reads real services, open times and (for a verified client) their appointments, and answers exactly as it would for a visitor.
- Anything that would change something (a booking, a callback, a message for your team, a reschedule, a cancel) is not carried out. No booking request, no appointment change, no alert, email or text to anyone. A note in the chat says what would have happened: "Preview: this would have sent a booking request for Tue Oct 6 at 2:00 PM … and notified your team. Nothing was saved or sent." A previewed late cancel also says what fee your cancellation policy would have applied.
- On an instant-booking page the preview checks the time the way a real booking does. A time a real booking would refuse gets a note saying so, and why (inside your minimum notice, outside the service's booking window, a closed day, a time another visit holds), and the assistant offers that day's open times as it would for a visitor: "Preview: a real booking of Cleaning on Tue Oct 6 at 7:00 AM would have been refused: it is inside your booking page's minimum notice (24 hours). The assistant was given that day's open times instead. Nothing was saved or sent."
- Previews aren't billed and don't count toward your monthly sessions. They don't appear in Transcripts, Live sessions, your stats or the digest, and they are deleted after a day.
- The preview link lasts an hour. After that the widget says "This preview has expired. Open it again from Assistants → Web Chat → Widget & embed → Preview chat."; open it again with Preview chat on the Widget & embed tab.
The widget loads in its own isolated frame, so it won't clash with your site's styles. On phones it expands to fill the screen when opened. A conversation follows the visitor as they move between pages of your site.
Review conversations & teach it
Open the Transcripts tab to read past conversations. Each row shows the visitor, what they asked about, the outcome tags (booked, verified, team stepped in, callback requested, after hours…), and the sentiment. Open any row to see the full exchange.
Under Behavior → Transcripts & learning:
- Daily transcript digest emails you each morning with yesterday's conversations (counts, top topics, questions the assistant couldn't answer, and after-hours callbacks). It never includes message content. Each team member turns this on for themselves.
- Capture unanswered questions saves anything the AI couldn't answer to a review list. Click Answer, write the answer, and it becomes knowledge the chat and your phone AI both use. Questions that look like they contain personal details are held back until you choose to show them.
- Find suggestions mines recent conversations for reusable answers. Approve the good ones; Dismiss the rest.
Good to know
- Same rules everywhere. Only services you've marked bookable online are offered, and lead-time, cancellation, and holiday-closure rules all apply. A service's own Booking window (Settings → Services) narrows your booking page's Minimum notice and Maximum advance for that service, the same way on your booking page, in the client portal and in the chat. See Set up online booking.
- Chat bookings are booking requests. A visitor who books gets a booking request, exactly like one from your booking page, and your team is notified. Accept it under Online Booking → Requests (see Handle booking requests).
- Family members verify with the patient's details. With Let verified clients look up their appointments, reschedule or cancel on (the client term follows your business type), someone asking about a parent, child, spouse or someone they care for gives the patient's first and last name, date of birth, and the phone or email on the patient's file. Without those, or if verification fails, the chat takes an appointment message for your team and never says the visit was changed. A visitor who says they need to move or cancel a visit is offered it right in the chat first; your office number is the fallback.
- No transfers in chat. The chat never offers to transfer anyone or connect a call. Where your instructions or knowledge mention transferring (wording written for the phone line), it gives your office phone number and offers to take a message instead. Office hours always come from your location's hours; another window in your knowledge, like when staff answer the phone, is called that window.
- Texts only with a yes. While your booking page offers its text-message box, the assistant asks a visitor once, before booking, whether your practice may text them about their appointments. A yes is kept on the request like a ticked box, so your answer can go by text; a no changes nothing about the booking.
- Your booking terms, only with a yes. When your booking page requires its Policy acknowledgement checkbox, the assistant asks the visitor to agree to your wording before booking, and books only after a yes. With the checkbox off or optional it doesn't ask.
- Late cancels. When a verified client cancels inside your cancellation window, the assistant tells them the fee and how it will be collected, and only cancels once they agree. The freed time is offered to your waitlist.
- Knowledge is shared. The assistant answers from your Custom Knowledge and accepted insurance.
- It's safe by design. Messages are moderated and length-limited, a conversation holds at most 40 messages, each visitor connection can send 60 messages and start 10 chats an hour, and transcripts are encrypted at rest.