Frequently Asked Questions

Getting Started

What is Authava?

Authava is an enterprise-grade chatbot platform backed by a managed service and AI strategy team. It is built by principal engineers, fully integrated, and designed to grow with your business. It's not just a chat widget. It's a system that captures real customer demand, surfaces insights, and becomes a more valuable part of your operation over time.

How do I get started — DIY or Managed Service?

Three paths:

DIY — sign up and start building your bot through the self-service portal. Full control, you run it.
DIY + Assisted Setup — we get you live with a one-time setup fee, then hand you the keys.
Managed Service — we handle setup, tuning, and ongoing operation together. Contact us to kick it off.

Not sure which fits? See the full comparison.

How long until my bot is live?

For DIY, you can start immediately after signing up.

For Managed Service, you'll hear back usually within one business day. A standard bot is typically live within a week. More complex bots with integrations or custom logic take longer, we'll scope that with you upfront.

What do I need to provide?

The bot knows what you tell it. To start, that usually means your website, any FAQ or documentation you have, and a sense of what questions you expect it to handle. The more context you provide, the better the answers.

For integrations - connecting to your CRM, authenticating users, calling your APIs - our managed services team works with you directly.

The Product

Is this just a chatbot, or is there more to it?

The chatbot is the entry way and therefore the most visible part, but it's one piece of a larger system. Authava also includes:

A managed service team that handles setup, tuning, and ongoing operation
A weekly report with patterns, themes, and actionable observations from your conversations
AI analysis on top of chat data — not just raw transcripts, but synthesized insight
Full API and integration layer — your bot can connect to your systems, inherit user authentication, push and receive data in real time

Will the bot give bad or made-up answers?

Authava is designed from the ground up to prevent hallucination — the bot answers from controlled, curated knowledge sources, not from open-ended AI guessing.

For live data like pricing, inventory, or account balances, the bot calls your API at the moment of the question. It doesn't guess.

Bot training is a skill. A poorly configured bot gives bad answers, which is worse than no bot. We encourage working with our managed services team to get it right from the start.

Can the bot connect to my systems and data?

Yes. Authava is API-first — anything you can do through the dashboard, you can also do through an API call. The bot can call your systems before, during, and after a conversation. It can inherit your app's authentication context, push data to your CRM, receive notifications from your backend, and be managed entirely programmatically.

Full details on integration capabilities.

What if I need more than just a chatbot, like an AI workflow?

Authava is not a workflow tool, and doesn't try to be. If you're running n8n or a similar platform, keep using it — Authava integrates cleanly with it. We can call your workflow, and your workflow can call us.

Before building anything custom, it's worth checking whether an existing Authava module already covers it. Post-chat analysis, quoting, lead capture, live agent handoff — these are reusable and ready to enable without any workflow logic.

For anything beyond that, our managed services team can help scope what's actually needed.

What makes Authava unique?

What customers tell us they appreciate is finding it all in one place:

Managed service — we set up, tune, and maintain the bot. You don't have to become an AI operator.
Built to prevent bad answers — controlled knowledge sources, deterministic APIs, and operational safeguards instead of letting AI guess.
Full integration — everything in the portal is also available via API, with hooks at every stage of the conversation.
Grows with you — start simple and expand without replacing your platform. You don't outgrow Authava.
Strategy layer — the bot captures customer signals. We help you turn those into insight about messaging, demand, and growth.
Built and operated in the United States.

Operations

What happens after go-live — do I have to manage it myself?

For DIY, yes — you own the tuning and upkeep. For Managed Service, we stay involved. Expect the first few weeks to involve some active tuning as real questions come in. After that, most bots settle into a reliable rhythm.

What you'll see operationally: full chat transcripts, optional email alerts, and a weekly report showing patterns and recommendations. The bot runs 24/7 — what you manage is the quality of its answers over time.

What to realistically expect after launch.

How Do I Get More Visitors to chat?

A few main factors:

Traffic

If no one is visiting your site, no one can chat.

We have seen partners install a bot and receive zero conversations, only to discover from their Growth Report that site traffic was near zero. Sometimes business owners assume they have traffic when the reality is that it is low-quality, artificial, or simply lower than expected. There are cases where agencies reported strong traffic KPIs while the business saw no chats and no sales. When that happens, the traffic itself is worth examining.

Configuration

Configuration changes are fast to experiment with and can have an immediate impact.

Open the chat by default. If the chat widget opens automatically — especially in a near-fullscreen layout on mobile — it will generate significantly more conversations than a small icon sitting quietly in the corner.
Use a custom avatar. A personal, human-looking icon consistently outperforms a generic chat bubble. It signals that there is something worth talking to.
Write an inviting opening message. A generic greeting like "Hello" gets ignored. More specific prompts perform better:

"What brings you here today?"
"Looking for pricing or just exploring?"

Install

Make sure the bot is installed on every page. Some businesses mistakenly add the bot only to their homepage, leaving the other 99 pages without it. Install the bot via a global script so it appears consistently across your entire site.

The opening message sets the tone. A question invites a response. A greeting does not.

What Is My Document and Message Quota?

Quota is not the issue.

Many of our partners run sites with 1,000 or more pages. We are a strategy partner, not an infrastructure provider. A utility focuses on the cost of a message. We focus on the value of one.

If you are generating a high volume of conversations, that means visitors are engaging with your business. That is a good problem to have — and exactly what we are here to help you make the most of.

Will the bot hurt my page performance?

No. A few reasons why:

The bot is hosted separately from your site, not on your servers
It loads via a standard JavaScript defer tag, so it never blocks your page from rendering
Website scanning for training is done offline and cached, with no runtime impact on your live site

As a side note: the bot widget itself loads quickly for visitors. It is served via CDN, which generally means faster load times, and the script footprint is small.

Pricing & Payment

What does it cost?

Pricing depends on your path:

DIY vs. Managed Service — self-serve or fully managed, with deeper options for authenticated portal bots
Additional Modules — expand capabilities as you need them, without rebuilding from scratch

Pricing is designed to start small and grow as you need it. No big upfront commitment. Let real customer conversations guide where you invest, not speculation. Because we build and own the platform, there is no bloated third-party dependencies or markups passed on to you.

How do I pay?

Standard credit card billing for DIY plans and Managed Service. More custom engagements are invoiced.

More Questions

I've tried chatbots before and wasn't impressed. Why would this be different?

Most chatbots fail for two reasons: bad answers, and hard limits on what they can do.

Bad answers come from bad training and over-relying on AI to guess. Authava is built with multiple layers to prevent that, answers come from curated knowledge and live API calls, not approximation. A Managed Services Team can get your bot off on the right track.

Hard limits come from the platform. No management API, no lifecycle hooks, no user authentication, no real integration. Authava was built by engineers who came from enterprise systems. The ceiling is high.

That said — the bot is only as good as what you put into it. If your site has gaps, the bot will reflect that. Here's what the experience actually looks like after go-live.

Is my data safe?

Yes. Authava is built from the ground up for multi-tenancy — your data is isolated by design, not as an afterthought. We avoid the shortcuts that look clean in demos but sacrifice security in production. Standard enterprise security practices throughout: hosted in enterprise data centers, encrypted in transit and at rest, least-privilege access, full tenant isolation. Built and operated in the United States. See More details on data safety.

What AI model does Authava use?

By default, GPT-4o is used for answer generation, and is hosted on Microsoft Azure's enterprise infrastructure. But that's just one step. Authava is a multi-layer system — document preparation and processing, chunking, embedding, search, and retrieval all happen before the model ever sees a question. Different models may be involved at different stages, and for enterprise setups, we can connect to your own. The bot can also call external APIs mid-conversation, for example, to handle a live product lookup, and those APIs may use their own models entirely.

Authava is more than just chat over a document library, the full pipeline can involve many different models.

Is Authava Chat just a wrapper around ChatGPT?

No. ChatGPT is a general-purpose assistant trained to answer anything from across the internet. Authava is purpose-built for your business — it answers only from the knowledge sources you provide (your website, documents, and approved data).

You probably wouldn’t want to open up a private, general-purpose ChatGPT session directly to your customers.

Authava also adds control layers on top of the AI model, including source prioritization, response constraints, and validation logic to reduce hallucinations and keep answers aligned with your business. See how Authava keeps bots accurate and avoids hallucinations.

Resources