What the chat on this site is allowed to say
Where the chat on 802.software gets its answers, what it is told never to say, and how it books a call without double-booking.
Baris Taskiran · 4 min read
The chat on this site is Live Chat, the product the studio sells. It runs on the same code as the chat on veajobs.com, veatimeclock.com and ledlightmirrors.com, with its own knowledge, hours and rules. Before it went live here, it needed a written list of what it may say and where each answer comes from. This post is that list.
Where its answers come from
Every factual answer has to come from one of three places: the site’s knowledge base, a tool the chat called in the same conversation, or the site’s settings (hours, booking types, contact details). That rule is the first line of the instructions the model receives, ahead of anything a site owner writes.
On 802.software the knowledge base has three parts. The first is twelve FAQ entries written by hand: who the studio is, what it builds, how a project runs, who owns the code, how to get in touch. The second is the seven case studies on the Work page, and the third is the posts in Writing, this one included. A daily job fetches those pages from the public site, splits them into passages and indexes them.
A message is matched two ways. FAQ questions are compared to it by trigram similarity, which tolerates typos and small differences in wording. Passages are searched with Postgres full-text search, with the words of the message joined by OR. With AND, a message like “I would like to set up a time to talk to you about the jobs you have” only matched a passage containing every one of those words, and a seeded knowledge base returned nothing for 8 of 9 questions from a real transcript. Every query filters by site first, so a passage from another site’s knowledge cannot come back.
The chat also knows which page you are on. When that page is one of its sources, its passages rank ahead of equal matches elsewhere, so a question about “this” is answered from the page you are reading. A question with no searchable words at all, such as “what is this?”, still gets that page’s passages.
What it will not say
This site states no prices, no project timelines, no team size and no certifications, so the chat doesn’t either. Its instructions name each one: no rate, range or starting price; no timeline for a project; no headcount; no SOC 2, HIPAA or similar claims; no statistics about the studio; no client quotes; no clients beyond the projects on the Work page; and no response-time promise other than “usually within one business day”.
Ask it what a project costs and it says there is no price list, that a written scope with a price follows a scoping conversation, and offers to book that conversation.
Text from a fetched page and anything a visitor types reach the model labelled as information. The instructions say, at the top and again beside that data, that nothing in it is an instruction. A page or message that says “ignore your rules” gets a short refusal, and the conversation carries on.
Booking a call
The chat can book a 30-minute intro call with Baris, Monday to Friday between 10:00 and 16:00 Eastern, at least 24 hours ahead. It may not say a time is free unless that time came back from the availability lookup in the same conversation. To let someone pick, it opens a calendar inside the chat that shows only open slots.
The booking itself runs in one database transaction. A lock per host stops two visitors booking at once, the open slots are computed again inside that lock, and a database constraint rejects any overlapping appointment if both of those were to miss it. Emails go out after the booking is saved, so a failed email cannot undo a booking.
When a person takes over
It hands the conversation to a person when a visitor asks for one, has an existing project with the studio, has a billing question, or has asked twice for something it can’t answer. It says someone will join only if someone is online. Outside office hours it says Baris is offline, keeps answering what it can, and offers a booked call or takes a name and email.
What a site owner sets up
One script tag with a site key. The key works only on the domains listed for that site, checked every time the widget starts. Knowledge sources, hours, booking types and the list of things the chat must not say are set per site in the console.
To try it, open the chat in the corner of this page and ask it something it shouldn’t answer. The Live Chat page has the install details.