Set up the chat widget

By the end of this page the SmileLine chat widget will be live on your practice website, branded to match, and every conversation it captures will land in your shared Inbox.

The chat widget is a messenger that sits in the corner of your practice website. Out of the box it runs a guided qualifier: visitors pick a treatment, answer a couple of questions, and leave their contact details — the lead lands on your journeys board like any other enquiry, with full attribution. With the AI assistant add-on it also answers free-text questions from your own knowledge base (see AI assistant).

Every message — the visitor's answers, the bot's prompts, your team's replies — is one conversation in the Inbox on the Live chat channel. Replies you send from the Inbox appear in the visitor's widget instantly.

Install it

Go to Settings → Chat widget and click Set up the chat widget. SmileLine creates the widget, its Live chat channel, and a hidden capture hook for its leads.

Copy the snippet from the Install card and paste it before the closing </body> tag on every page of your website (or into your site builder's "custom scripts" slot):

<script async src="https://widget-eu.smileline.io/widget.js" data-key="YOUR_KEY"></script>

The EU hostname above is illustrative. Copy the generated snippet exactly: US organizations use widget-us.smileline.io.

Flip Widget live on. The launcher appears on your site within a few minutes. On each page it mounts once the page's own content is ready and the browser has an idle moment — at most 1.5 seconds after that — and loads its configuration in the background, so it never slows your site down.

The key in the snippet identifies your practice — no login or API key is needed on your website. Switching Widget live off makes the snippet render nothing without touching your site.

Brand it

The Appearance card controls how the messenger looks:

Display name — shown in the panel header, usually your practice name.
Greeting — the first message visitors see.
Brand colour — drives the launcher, visitor bubbles and the send button.
Reply-time copy — the expectation line under your name, e.g. "Typically replies in a few minutes".
Position — bottom right or bottom left.

Changes reach embedded widgets within about a minute.

Preview it live

A working copy of your messenger sits in the corner of the Settings → Chat widget page. Click its launcher to open it, exactly as a visitor would. The launcher stays in the corner while the messenger is open — it turns into a chevron, and clicking it again closes the panel.

The preview follows the form as you type, before you save: rename the practice, change the brand colour or move the widget to the left and it updates immediately. You can also click straight through the guided qualifier to check the treatments and questions read well.

Nothing in the preview is real. It creates no conversation in your Inbox and captures no lead, so anything you type into it is discarded. AI answers and the online-booking button are not part of it — use Test the assistant on the same page for those.

Proactive messages

Proactive messages open the conversation for you on specific pages — a visitor reading your implants page gets a tailored line after a few seconds. Add them on the Proactive messages card:

Page matches — a fragment of the page URL, with * as a wildcard: /treatments/implants*.
Message — the teaser bubble text.
Delay — seconds after the widget has loaded before the teaser appears.

Visitors can dismiss a teaser; it won't reappear during that browsing session.

Replying from the Inbox

Widget conversations behave like any other channel: they appear in the Inbox as Live chat threads, unread counts tick up as visitors write, and anything your team types is pushed to the visitor's browser in real time with the sender's first name — the "a human has joined" moment. The contact panel shows which page the visitor is chatting from.

Templates can't be sent to the widget — they're built for email, SMS and WhatsApp. Attachments can.

Sending files

Visitors can send you photos and documents from the messenger — the thing people most often want to do first ("here's the tooth"). Three ways, all of them working the same:

The paperclip next to the message box opens their file picker.
Paste — a screenshot copied to the clipboard drops straight into the message box.
Drag and drop anywhere onto the open messenger.

Files appear as thumbnails above the message box before sending, each with an × to remove it. A message can carry files with or without any text, and up to 16 MiB per file.

Your team can reply with a file the same way, from the Inbox's own paperclip. Images show inline in both directions; everything else appears as a named download.

While the guided qualifier is still running, a file is delivered to your Inbox straight away but doesn't count as an answer — the widget carries on asking the question it was on. That way a photo sent before someone has given their phone number still reaches you.