A Partial Feature List: What a Production Chatbot Includes
A Partial Feature List: What a Production Chatbot Includes
A production chatbot is not one feature. Authava's chat platform alone includes more than 150 working features, from how the widget looks to how answers are checked, handed to people, connected to your systems, and secured. This is a partial list, not everything the platform does. If you're weighing whether to build your own, it shows the kind of work you'd be taking on.
Why This List Exists
With today's AI coding tools, a working chatbot demo can be built in an afternoon. That demo is the easy part.
A real conversation system has to look right on every website and phone, answer accurately from messy content, know when it doesn't know, hand off to a person, connect to other systems safely, and keep doing all of that while your business changes. Each of those breaks down into dozens of smaller features, and each feature has to be built, tested, secured, and maintained.
Every item below exists in the Authava platform today. Some are self-service in Studio; others are set up by our managed services team. The list covers the chat platform only. It doesn't include the Growth Report, the Phone Bot, the Outreach Bot, or the managed service around them.
1. Widget Appearance and Branding
- Brand color theming that re-themes the whole widget
- Custom logo in the header and next to every bot message
- Custom launcher icon
- Custom widget title
- Option to hide the launcher button (open the bot only from your own button)
- Option to hide the close button
- Configurable default open size: compact, large, almost-fullscreen, or fullscreen
- Visitor-resizable chat window
- Automatic fullscreen on phones
- Style isolation, designed to keep your site's CSS and the widget's from interfering with each other
- Smooth open and close animations that respect "reduce motion" accessibility settings
- Company name shown in the widget and the live-chat interface
2. Conversation Experience
- Streaming replies that appear word by word
- Typing indicator
- Stop a reply mid-generation and keep what was written so far
- Formatted replies: headings, bold, lists, tables, and links
- Sanitized rendering that strips common script-injection patterns
- Clickable reply buttons inside the bot's message
- Preset quick-reply questions
- Quick-reply layouts (horizontal, vertical, wrapped) and hide-after-click
- Custom slash commands with searchable autocomplete
- Phrase-triggered actions
- Conversation survives a page reload
- One-click "clear conversation"
- Auto-close after inactivity
- Auto-open on page load
- Greeting tooltip bubble with optional auto-dismiss
- Configurable first message
- Personalized greetings for known visitors
- Link behavior: new tab, same tab, or same tab only within your site
- Tracking parameters added automatically to links the bot shares
- Auto-scroll to the newest message
- Responds and greets in the visitor's browser language
- Remembers earlier messages so follow-up questions make sense
- A scripted message inserted after a set number of exchanges
- Protection against your site's keyboard shortcuts swallowing typed text
- Phone-tuned layout, including iOS keyboard handling
- Live preview of your bot in a new tab
- Paste an image straight into the message box
3. Knowledge and Content
- Document upload: PDF, Word, plain text, Markdown, CSV, JSON, and HTML
- Automatic reading, splitting, and indexing of documents
- Website crawler that imports your pages as knowledge
- Crawl status: queued, running, finished, or failed, with page counts
- Re-crawl on demand
- Meaning-based (semantic) search, not just keyword matching
- Weighted knowledge sources, so some sources are trusted more than others
- Q&A pairs for specific questions
- Layered Q&A matching: exact text, then AI classification, then meaning-based similarity
- Adjustable matching threshold per Q&A pair
- Word-for-word approved answers for legal, pricing, or policy language
- Natural-language product catalog search by category, brand, price, and availability
- Authoritative facts that take priority over documents and crawled pages
- Search, download, and bulk-delete uploaded documents
4. Answer Control and Accuracy
- A plain-language bot purpose that shapes its answers
- Topics to focus on
- Topics to avoid
- Message guardrails: rate limiting, a threat-intelligence IP blocklist, a profanity filter, and custom blocked keywords
- A clear "I don't know" fallback instead of a guess
- Checks that an outside system's response is usable before the bot relies on it
- Answer tracing that shows which source and method produced an answer
- Scheduled automatic test conversations to catch problems early
- Plain-language notification rules evaluated by AI, such as "notify me if the visitor seems frustrated"
- Automatic fallback to a default AI provider if the chosen one fails
5. Lead Capture
- Contact details collected through conversation, not a form
- Configurable delay before the bot starts asking
- Waiting period before asking again after a visitor skips a question
- Maximum attempts per field
- Configurable pace, such as one question every few messages
- Detects when a visitor declines and stops asking
- AI extraction of several details from one free-form answer
- An automatic follow-up once everything is collected
- Collected leads dashboard with search, bulk delete, and CSV export
6. Files, Images, and Rich Content
- Visitor file attachments: images, PDFs, text, CSV, JSON, and Word documents
- Drag-and-drop or click-to-attach
- Paste-to-send images
- Inline image previews with full-size view
- Download links for non-image files
- Action buttons that navigate, send a follow-up, trigger an integration, or open a link
- Confirmation step before consequential actions
- Interactive widgets inside a chat message, such as a booking calendar or order tracker, with a fullscreen option
- Interactive charts and data snapshots, downloadable as HTML or PDF
- Logo upload
- File sharing during live chat with a person
- Deleted files leave a "removed by" note in the transcript
7. Notifications
- Automatic email summaries after a conversation goes quiet
- Notification rules, written in plain language or based on which preset questions were used
- AI-written conversation analysis attached to the notification
- Multiple recipients, each with their own transcript and report settings
8. Live Chat With a Person
- One-click "talk to a person" request
- Minimum number of bot messages before the option appears
- Weekly support-hours schedule in your time zone
- Status shown at each stage: requesting, waiting, connected, reconnecting
- Real-time messaging between the visitor and your team
- Automatic reconnection after a dropped connection
- "Joined" and "left" messages in the conversation
- Live agent queue showing waiting and active conversations
- Badges, sounds, and browser notifications for new requests
- AI-suggested replies for your team
- Full-screen and compact agent views
- Awareness of when the visitor disconnects or comes back
9. Integrations and Actions
- A standard tool framework for reaching outside systems mid-conversation, through the MCP Gateway
- Call any REST API as a tool, with its own URL, headers, and data
- Automatic OAuth token refresh for connected accounts
- Fixed or templated tool responses, returned word for word
- Interactive widgets as tool results
- Tools shown only to certain visitors, such as signed-in users
- Configuration checks that catch errors before a setup goes live
- Generic webhook integration
- HubSpot contacts, deals, and companies
- Your website's own JavaScript functions triggered by the bot
- A JavaScript API to open, close, and message the widget, and listen for a "ready" event. See Integrate with your Page
10. Signed-In Users and Portals
- Recognizes visitors signed in through AWS Cognito
- One-click sign-in handoff from your site into the chat
- Sessions that stay recognized across visits
- Guest mode for public bots and testing
- Portal bots scoped to the signed-in user or account. See Portal Bot
- Automatic session renewal before it expires
- Signed session identifiers instead of guessable IDs
- The visitor's identity passed along when the bot calls your systems
11. Conversation Review and Analytics
- Full transcript viewer with in-transcript search
- Filter conversations by the integration the bot used
- Search and filter conversations by date and length
- Bulk delete conversations
- Export as a CSV summary, full-text transcripts, or CSV transcripts
- Download any single conversation as a PDF
- AI-written conversation summaries
- Unique visitors, page views, and most-visited pages
- Visitor location map
12. Administration
- Step-by-step bot creation wizard
- Auto-saved setup drafts you can resume
- Dashboard of all your bots
- Bot deletion protected by a typed confirmation
- Per-bot permission levels: view, edit, delete, admin
- Team invitations by email
- Required password change after a temporary-password invite
- Account settings: display name, email, password, and email preferences
- One-line install snippet with placement guidance
- Real-time availability check for your bot's hosted address
- Plan comparison inside the app
- Self-service screens hidden automatically for managed-service accounts
- Subscription, payment method, and invoice management
13. Security and Data Controls
- Message rate limiting
- Threat-intelligence IP blocklist
- IP blocking and a log of flagged messages
- Profanity and custom keyword filters
- Signed connection tokens locked to the exact business and conversation, with automated tests against reuse
- Business- and conversation-level isolation, with automated tests covering cross-access attempts
- Integration keys and tokens encrypted at rest
- Sanitized message rendering
- Restricted permissions for widgets embedded in chat
- File deletion that removes the stored file and records who removed it
- Encoded link values in embedded widgets
What This Means for Build vs. Buy
Every line above was designed, built, and tested, and each one has to keep working as browsers, AI models, and your business change. A new chatbot project usually starts with the first few items in sections 2 and 3, and discovers the rest one support ticket at a time.
That's the core of the Build vs. Buy question: not whether you could build a chatbot, but whether you want to build and own all of this.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many features does a production chatbot need?
Far more than a demo shows. Authava's chat platform alone includes more than 150 working features across the widget, knowledge, accuracy, live chat, integrations, analytics, administration, and security.
Can't I just build a chatbot with AI coding tools?
You can build a demo quickly. The work is in everything around it: accuracy controls, handoff to people, integrations, security, analytics, and keeping it all working as things change.
Are all of these features available in Studio?
Many are self-service in Studio. Others, especially integrations and sign-in, are set up by our managed services team. See What You Can and Can't Do in Studio.
Does this list include everything Authava offers?
No. It's a partial list of the chat platform only, so some features aren't on it. The Growth Report, Phone Bot, Outreach Bot, and managed services are on top of this.