What live chat is
Live chat is a real-time conversation between a customer and a human agent through a website or app widget. It's the highest-quality channel for nuanced or emotional issues because a person can read context, improvise, and show empathy. The trade-off is cost and coverage: chat is only as fast as your staffing, and it goes quiet outside business hours.
What a chatbot is
A chatbot answers automatically — either through fixed decision-tree flows or, increasingly, an AI agent trained on your help center. It responds instantly, handles unlimited conversations at once, and never sleeps. The limit is scope: a rules bot only knows its scripts, and even an AI agent should hand off to a human when it isn't confident.
When to use which
Use a chatbot to deflect the repetitive, well-documented questions instantly and around the clock; use live chat for the conversations that genuinely need a person. You rarely choose one — the modern setup puts an AI agent and your human team behind the same widget, so the bot answers what it can and pulls in a teammate the moment it can't.
Which should you use?
Not an either/or. Let a chatbot — ideally an AI agent grounded in your help center — handle the instant, repetitive questions, and route everything else to live chat with a human. One widget, both behind it: that's how teams stay fast without staffing for every question.
