Set up your AI assistant

Your chat widget comes with an AI assistant that answers visitors straight away, day and night. It answers from what it knows about your business, can read the page the visitor is looking at, saves the visitor's email when they share it, and — if you allow it — hands the conversation to you when a person is needed.

Turn the assistant on

1. Click Settings at the bottom of the menu.
2. Under Chat widgets, click your widget and open AI assistant.
3. Switch on Enable AI — "AI will automatically respond to visitor messages".
4. Click Save Changes.

For most projects the assistant is already on: when ProjectHQ analyses your website, it switches the AI on for your first widget and writes its instructions from your brand. New widgets you add yourself start with the AI off.

Give it a name and instructions

• Assistant Name — the name visitors see in the chat, for example "Ava" or "Support". If you leave it empty, the widget's name is used.
• System Prompt — your instructions for the assistant: what to focus on, the tone to use, what to say about pricing, what it should never promise. Write it as you would brief a new colleague.

ProjectHQ fills in a first prompt for you, built from your brand settings — who you are, who your customers are and how you sound. It also tells the assistant to answer only from your Knowledge Base, say so when it doesn't know, and reply in the visitor's language. Edit it freely; once you've changed it, ProjectHQ won't overwrite it.

Tip: The assistant is only as good as what it knows. Add your pricing, policies and FAQs to the Knowledge Base — see Teach the AI about your business.

What the assistant does in a conversation

• Looks things up in your Knowledge Base before it answers questions about your products, prices or policies.
• Reads the page the visitor is on when they ask about it ("what does this plan include?").
• Saves leads. When a visitor shares their email — for example so you can follow up — it saves them as a contact and you get a notification. See Manage contacts.
• Hands over to you (when Transfer to Human is on). When it can't help, or the visitor asks for a person, it transfers the conversation to you and leaves a note why. You see it in Live Chat and get notified. See Answer conversations.
• Closes resolved conversations once the visitor's question is answered.

Decide whether it hands over to you

Transfer to Human — "Allow AI to transfer conversations to a human agent" — decides whether the assistant may pass a conversation to a person.

• On (the default): when the assistant can't help, it offers to connect the visitor with you and hands the conversation over. Leave it on if someone on your team answers in Live Chat.
• Off: the assistant never hands a conversation to a person and never promises one. When it can't answer, it says so plainly. For anonymous visitors it can still offer to have your team follow up by email, and saves their address as a contact. Switch it off if nobody watches Live Chat.

Either way, you can step into any conversation yourself by replying to it.

Make it look the part

• AI Assistant Animation — choose how the assistant's avatar moves while it thinks and writes (Orbi, Pulse, Wave, Idle, Spark), and the Icon Color inside it. Pick Custom to upload your own image for each state.
• Use AI Icon as Launcher — show the animated assistant as the chat button on your site and in the chat header, instead of the regular chat icon.

Connect your own tools (advanced)

Under MCP Servers you can give the assistant tools from your own systems — for example to look up an order status. Click Add Server, enter a Server Name and the Endpoint URL of your MCP server, add an API Key if it needs one, and click Connect Server. ProjectHQ lists the tools it found; switch a server off to stop the assistant from using it.

This is the opposite direction from Use ProjectHQ from ChatGPT, Claude or Cursor, which lets your AI assistant read ProjectHQ.

During the trial and on the free plan

The same name-and-email step appears whenever Enable AI is off: after the visitor's first message, the widget says "Leave your email and we'll get back to you." Visitors you've already identified on your site skip it. See Plans, trial and limits.