# Cited chat widget

> Embed the usedocs.app support widget with one script tag: cited answers, your help center, and your changelog in tabs. Answers cite source pages.

## What it does

The widget is a customer facing chat that answers from your help center. Reliable answers link the article they came from. Weak matches decline instead of guessing, and the question becomes a gap. Handoffs go to your team by email, with alerts in Slack, Discord, Teams, or a signed webhook.

## Tabs

With the home screen on, the widget has tabs: Home, Messages, Help, What's new, and Contact. Home opens on your cover color with the ask box, then your suggested questions, popular articles, your latest update, and your links. Messages lists the visitor's conversations from the last 90 days in that browser, and any of them can be reopened and continued. Help searches and reads your help center articles inside the widget, and What's new shows your changelog. Contact is a short form that lands in your Inbox, with a shortcut to ask the assistant first. The tabs stay at the bottom of every page except an open conversation, and Help, What's new, and Contact each have their own switch.

Each tab keeps its place. A cited article opens on top of the chat, and the back arrow returns to the conversation. None of this changes the address of the page the widget is on. Turn the home screen off in Widget, Behavior, and the widget opens straight into chat.

## Size and motion

The expand button turns the widget into a tall panel on the launcher's side. On phones the widget opens full screen. Escape closes it and returns focus to the launcher, and visitors who ask for reduced motion get simple fades.

## What it keeps in the browser

The widget keeps its size, its launcher position, and a random token in local storage. The token finds that browser's conversations for the Messages tab; usedocs stores only a hash of it, and a conversation can't be read or continued with another browser's token.

## How to embed

The dashboard gives you a script tag with `data-bot-id` and `data-bot-key`. Load `/widget.js` from usedocs.app. Allowed origins must include the page you embed on. The header link opens the published help center in a new tab.