Open Inbox and pick a conversation. Everything the visitor and the AI said is there, with the AI's citations intact.
Replies that go out by themselves, or ones you send
By default the AI answers every conversation by itself, and its replies go out straight away, with nobody on your team pressing send. Most questions never need a person, as long as the answer is somewhere in the content you trained it on.
When you would rather answer yourself, just reply. The Assist panel (AI Draft, on Pro) can write that reply for you: it drafts one from your own help content and tells you honestly whether it found grounding for it. A grounded draft comes with citations; an ungrounded one says so. Choose Use draft to put it in your composer, edit it, and send it.
For email, you choose which of the two is the default. See Answering email as well as chat.
Reply
Type in the composer and send. The moment you send a reply, the AI stops answering that conversation, so nothing is sent over the top of you. The chat header switches from the AI to your team, and your reply is marked as a person's.
There is nothing special to do to take over: sending a reply is the takeover. The conversation then shows "You're handling this one — the AI has stopped replying."
To answer one particular message, hover over it and choose Quote. It appears quoted in your composer, so the visitor knows exactly what you are addressing.
Note
Switch the composer to Note to leave an internal note instead. Notes are never sent to the visitor, and leaving one does not take the conversation over from the AI.
Notes are useful for flagging things for teammates, logging a call summary, or leaving a reminder before you hand back to the AI.
Handing it back
When you are done, choose Let the AI reply on the conversation to release it.
The AI then answers the visitor's next message from your trained content. If the visitor hasn't sent anything new yet, the AI waits: it doesn't send a follow-up on its own just because control was returned.
Until you hand it back, no reply goes out unless someone on your team writes one.
When to step in
Step in yourself when a visitor is upset, when the request is too complicated or multi-part for the AI to handle cleanly, or when the issue needs a judgment call — a refund decision, an exception to policy, anything where the right answer depends on context the AI doesn't have.
Troubleshooting
The visitor didn't receive your reply. Check that the composer was set to Reply and not Note when you sent it. Notes stay inside your team.