
Channels holds the Install menu and the three website surfaces: Chat bubble, Help page and Center stage.
What it does
- Adds a pill-shaped Chat now launcher to every page from one script tag. The conversation itself loads only when a visitor reaches for it, so a chat nobody opens costs your page next to nothing.
- Puts the chat inline on a help or contact page with an iframe. Give it at least 700 pixels of height.
- Offers three website surfaces: Chat bubble (a corner window while visitors browse), Help page (a dedicated support page) and Center stage (a focused conversation in the middle of your site). Each one can be switched off on its own.
- Takes files from visitors, up to five files of 5 MB each per message, on Hobby and up.
- Hands the chat to your team: AI replies pause and a person takes over from the helpdesk inbox.
- Lets visitors dictate or talk to the agent out loud, within your plan’s call limits.
What you need
- An agent with website chat among its surfaces. An agent made with Create AI agent has it from the start. An agent made through onboarding has whatever you ticked on the deployment step.
- The Owner or Member role. Viewers can try the agent in Playground but cannot save changes. These workspace roles apply to your dashboard team, not to people using the widget.
- Access to your site’s shared layout, or to the page that should hold the inline chat.
- Hobby and up for visitor files. Live chat with your team needs Helpdesk, and voice calls need Voice: both come with Standard and up.
Set it up
The floating chat bubble
Open the Install menu

The Playground keeps an Install shortcut beside the chat bubble preview.
Choose Website widget

Channels, Install: choose the widget, the iframe or Shopify. WordPress is marked Coming soon.
Copy the snippet
?v=10 in place: it names the version of the widget script the
snippet was made for.
The Website widget panel holds the snippet and the Specific domains allowlist.
Paste it into your site
</body> tag, so it
loads on every page. If someone else maintains the site, Send instructions
via email writes the snippet and where it goes into a mail you can
forward. Copy prompt gives the same instructions phrased for an AI
assistant, if you edit your site with one.Check it in a private window
The inline chat
Choose Website iframe
Paste the iframe where the chat belongs
allow="microphone" if you edit the code: voice calls need it.Only on your own sites
By default the chat loads wherever the snippet is pasted, including on a site that is not yours.Turn on Specific domains
List the sites, one per line
*. covers the domain and every subdomain under it. You can
write https://example.com too: the scheme and any port are ignored. Up to
50 entries.Save the list
Shopify and WordPress
For a Shopify store, use Channels → Install → Shopify, connect the store, and enable and save Centillion chat in the active theme’s app embeds. No snippet goes into the theme. See Shopify setup and actions. The WordPress option in the Install menu is still coming soon; the snippets above work on WordPress when pasted into the site’s layout.Use it every day
Appearance and behaviour
The launcher shows the agent’s picture on the left and Chat now on the right. The picture is the one under Display, Content, Agent picture, the same one the chat header shows; without one, the Centillion logo stands in. An agent created from a website starts with that site’s icon as its picture and the site’s brand colour as its accent (see creating an agent). Chat now expands the pill into the conversation. Close or the Escape key collapses it and keeps the conversation and any unsent message. The chat runs in its own frame, apart from your page’s styles. In Display, choose the light or dark theme, the launcher’s position and offsets, the conversation size, and whether it starts open or closed. Edit Floating bubble, Button label to replace Chat now. The Chat now and Close buttons take the accent colour when it is on. Auto-open after a delay is off unless you turn it on. A widget set to start open, or shown without a launcher, loads with the page. The Playground preview starts open so you can test at once. It follows your dashboard theme, except in Display, where it shows the theme you are editing. Switching tabs keeps the conversation and unsaved drafts; choose Save changes to save the draft, then Publish in the top bar to update new customer conversations. Each surface has a Visibility switch on the Playground’s Overview tab. Turning one off stops it showing and routing messages to your agent. The same tab can give the surface its own instructions. Every agent uses version control. The chat opens with its assigned version’s greeting and appearance, and an explicit restart loads a version by the current traffic split. Domain allowlists and plan limits still apply at once.Live support with your team
Enable Centillion Helpdesk, then set up Centillion live chat under Tools → Add tool → New tool → Integration and select Chat bubble, Help page or Center stage. A customer who asks for a person gets a waiting confirmation and can keep writing in the same chat. AI replies pause, and your teammates continue from a Live chat ticket. The chat timeline marks when live support starts and when AI replies resume, apart from the messages themselves. For a person to handle the first message, turn on Human-first conversations in Helpdesk settings, Human handoff. Chat bubble and Help page conversations without a ticket then enter the inbox before the AI answers. This does not apply to Center stage or the Playground. Center stage runs at/embed/YOUR_AGENT_ID/center-stage on the app domain; enable its
channel as well as selecting it in the live chat action. Its chat, ticket
history and human replies stay with that Center stage conversation, and the
domain allowlist applies there too.
When live alerts are on, the widget tells your team which page the visitor is
on. Only the address is sent, never the part after ? or #.
Files from visitors
Visitors attach files with the paperclip, by dropping them on the chat or by pasting. Images show a preview; wait for Ready to send. If sending fails, the text and files return to the message box. The agent sees images and reads the text of documents with the message they arrive in; later it knows them by name. A model that cannot read images is told an image was sent. Files stay private with the conversation: open them from Conversations or the Helpdesk, where they stay on the ticket. Turn off Attachments under Display, Capabilities to stop uploads.Voice and dictation
Start dictation fills the message box from the visitor’s speech, in browsers that support speech recognition, and works whenever Voice to text (Dictation) is on. Start a voice conversation starts a call: the agent opens with the First message → Call from Agent, or a greeting with its name when that is empty, then the visitor speaks, the agent answers in its own voice, and the visitor can cut in. Pressing it again ends the call, and typing still works during it. The call button appears only when dictation is on in Display and voice is on for the agent with its voice settings complete. The browser asks for microphone access the first time.Your site, your customers
- Control the bubble from your site.
window.centillion.open(),close()andresetChat()connect your own buttons.setOptions()changes the title, launcher label, greetings, suggestions and composer for the current page load. Chat bubble controls covers proactive messages and dictation-only mode too. - Listen for events. Sent messages, finished answers, tool calls and
results, dictation transcripts and option changes reach
window.centillion.addEventListener; a plain iframe posts them to its parent. See event listeners. - Recognise signed-in customers. Your server signs the user’s ID and the page passes the signature, so the agent can link the chat to their contact and answer about their account. With a signed identity, the script syncs the contact before the widget opens. Choose Set up identity verification in the Install sheet, then read identity verification. Without it, every visitor is anonymous.
- Run actions on your site. The script embed supports website functions, which call functions your site registers.
- Billing questions. Stripe actions run in the Chat bubble for identified visitors whose contact is linked to a Stripe customer. Invoice and subscription cards appear in chat; changes open Stripe’s portal. Help page and Center stage do not run them.
- Meeting bookings. A Cal.com booking action on Chat bubble, Help page or Center stage shows a calendar in the chat. Visitors pick a time zone and a free slot, enter their details and confirm. Confirming a test in Playground creates a real appointment.
- Procedures. Free-form procedures load instructions for a task. Structured procedures enforce an ordered sequence, with Ask steps waiting for the visitor’s answer. Referenced actions must be enabled for the website surface.
- Campaign attribution. The script embed keeps the visitor’s first
campaign for the tab session and adds its five UTM parameters to agent links
back to your site. It needs
embed.js?v=5or later on every page. See UTM tracking.
A/B testing
Show the agent to a share of visitors and compare them with visitors who see no chat. Open Playground, Chat bubble or Center stage, then under Display, A/B testing, turn on Show to a percentage of visitors. Enter a whole number from 0 to 100 and choose Save changes. It starts at 50% when enabled and is shared by Chat bubble and Center stage. 0% hides the agent from everyone; 100%, or turning testing off, makes every visitor eligible. Turning it off keeps your percentage for next time. Each browser gets a random assignment that stays across visits. The percentage is a target, so a small sample may differ. Raising it adds visitors and keeps everyone already in. For included visitors,setOptions() also loads
the chat frame so it can confirm it rendered. Excluded visitors see
neither launcher nor chat, and auto-open or open() cannot reveal it. Direct
iframes and Center stage apply the split too; the Help page and the dashboard
preview always show. If the browser cannot store an assignment, a value from 1
to 99 keeps the widget hidden there. Clearing site storage or changing browser
can change an assignment.
Limits and good to know
- Rate limit. By default an agent answers up to 20 messages every four minutes from each visitor, who then sees “Too many messages in a row”. If all visitors together send ten times that (200 messages every four minutes by default), the agent pauses on your website until the window moves on. Change the limit under Guardrails: 1 to 1000 messages, over a window of up to 24 hours, with your own message. WhatsApp, email, SMS and other channels never count toward it. A visitor is known by the ID the chat sends, which stays the same for a browser across the bubble and the inline chat; a modified client can send a new ID each time, which is why the agent-wide limit exists.
- Visitor files. Up to five files of 5 MB per message: PNG, JPG, GIF and WEBP images, and PDF, DOCX, TXT, CSV and MD documents. PDFs up to five pages and 2,000 tokens per page. Each image and PDF page adds the model’s credit rate to the request (see Plans and billing). Each visitor can send 30 files an hour, and an agent takes 600 an hour.
- Voice calls. The limits on calls per day and calls at once apply to the widget and are checked when the visitor presses the button. A call that reaches the maximum call length ends: the agent says a short goodbye and hangs up, unless a teammate has taken it over. A call also ends a few seconds after the agent says goodbye if nobody speaks. If the visitor goes quiet in the middle of a call, the agent follows the silence prompt and cutoff in Settings → Advanced → Conversational behavior. Either timer can be disabled. The same card controls waiting phrases and the maximum duration message. See Conversational behavior.
- The allowlist checks the page that loaded the chat, which browsers report as the referring site. It deters a copied snippet; do not treat it as a security boundary.
- Video avatar. You cannot set up or edit a video avatar in the dashboard today. An avatar saved earlier keeps working, as a panel docked to the side of the page with its own launcher.
- Branding. The branding add-on removes the Centillion footer from your public agents and workspace emails. An Owner adds it in Workspace settings, Plans.
Questions
The chat does not appear on my site. What should I check?
View the live page’s source and search forembed.js. A snippet in a draft
layout, or in a template you did not redeploy, is the usual cause. Then copy
the snippet again from the Install sheet, which rules out a wrong agent ID. If
both are right, the agent may not have website chat among its surfaces.