Website chat assistant
A serverless chat widget that lives on your website, answers visitors from your own knowledge in real time, hands the rest to a human cleanly, and turns every miss into a better answer next week. Seven posts on the same system — one diagram at a time — with an engineering reference at the end.
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01
A website chat assistant on AWS for a few dollars a month
The whole system on one page — a gateway, an answerer, and a handoff-and-learning piece, plus the four moves they share for every visitor turn.
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02
How a conversation starts and stays alive
Connect, exchange, idle. A websocket and a small scratchpad — that’s the whole shape. Short-term memory only.
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03
How the assistant answers
Four tools, one pick per turn: answer, clarify, hand off, decline. No citation, no auto-answer.
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04
How a handoff to a human works
Tell, package, deliver, hold. The visitor never repeats themselves to the human; the transcript is the ticket.
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05
How gaps become better answers
A small clockwise loop — log every miss, group similar questions, write a paragraph, re-index automatically. Ten minutes a week makes month two’s assistant meaningfully better than month one’s.
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06
What the chat assistant costs
A coffee a month at SMB volume. Cents per conversation, dominated by Bedrock tokens for the answerer.
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07
Engineering reference: the chat assistant architecture
Same system, drawn purely for engineers. Service names, resource identifiers, region, Bedrock model IDs, Knowledge Base wiring.