Choose who answers your chat - and the bot now knows to get out of the way

A chat widget with a bot on it used to have exactly one behaviour: the bot answered everything. Now you choose, per bot, from four answering modes. AI first, then a human is the default and works as before - the bot answers and hands over when it isn't confident. AI only never escalates. Humans only keeps the bot silent, so a widget can carry a bot for after-hours without using it during the day. And the one most teams actually want: humans while we're open, AI otherwise - visitors reach a real person while someone is online and you're inside your office hours, and outside that the bot picks up instead of leaving them waiting until Monday. Both conditions have to hold for a human to take it, so an open-hours window with nobody actually online still gets answered. Underneath all four is one rule that can't be switched off: the bot stops the moment a teammate steps in. Replying to a conversation, or simply assigning it to yourself, takes it over - from that point the bot won't add another word to that thread, no matter which mode it's in. Previously this was inferred by checking whether anyone had replied yet, which worked but couldn't be undone; now it's an explicit state you can see and reverse. The conversation header in the Inbox shows Bot handling or You have it, with Take over and Return to bot beside it - so you can silence the bot before you start typing, and hand a resolved conversation back afterwards. Handing a live customer back to a bot is recorded in the audit log, because it's a real decision. Visitors can also just ask: "can I talk to a human" and similar phrasings route the conversation to your team. That check is deliberately conservative - it looks for an actual request rather than any mention of people, so asking whether you have a human resources module doesn't silence the bot. One quiet fix came with it: a widget outside office hours with a bot attached that wasn't going to answer used to send the visitor nothing at all. Your away message now appears whenever the bot isn't taking the turn.