Best AI Live Chat Software to Automate Customer Support

Live chat software has become a staple of modern, web-based businesses—it’s cheap, efficient, and, according to Zendesk’s research, yields the second-highest customer satisfaction scores of any support channel.

AI live chat software has the potential to take this already-effective tool and make it even better by offering customers the convenience of 24/7 support and automated responses to common questions.

In this Customerly article, we’ll simplify your search for the best AI live chat tools with a curated list of the ten best options on the market. We’ll cover key features, pricing, pros, and cons to give you all the information you need to choose the best tool for your business.

Let’s dive in.

AI live chat software is designed to bring AI’s predictive and generative power to your live chat tool.

Rather than relying entirely on human support and sales reps for routine tasks, AI live chat software lets you offload some of the work to an automated chat assistant. This frees your team up to focus on more complex or pressing issues—the kind that really need human intervention.

But what kinds of routine tasks are we talking about here? Take a look at this example of Customerly’s AI Assistant in action:

In this example, the AI Chatbot (Aura) uses AI to generate a complete response to a customer complaint using context from the conversation, knowledge base articles, canned responses, customer data, and training materials. But that’s just one use case for AI live chat software—they can also:

• Escalate automatically to the Human team
• Suggest canned responses
• Direct customers to self-help resources
• Route customers to the correct agent
• Understand query intent
• Summarize conversations into action points

and much more.

To summarize, AI live chat software uses artificial intelligence to improve and expedite customer interactions across sales, customer service, and marketing.

Reduced Workloads & Better Prioritization

The most obvious benefit of AI live chat software is that these tools eliminate a significant amount of busy work. In customer service alone, AI-powered chatbots are expected to save businesses 2.5 billion hours by the end of 2023.

For lean teams, these tools are a lifesaver. They allow you to get through routine tasks more efficiently so that there’s the capacity to handle complex issues when they arise.

24/7 Availability 

AI chatbots are online 24/7—ready to help customers while your customer service and sales reps get their rest.

Studies (and common sense) show that customers hate waiting.

Wait times are one of the main drivers of overall customer satisfaction. By eliminating wait times entirely with an always-online AI live chat software as your first line of defense, you’re setting yourself up for success.

Simple Scalability

The vast majority of sales and customer service inquiries are simple queries. 

But when you rely on humans to respond, even these basic inquiries may require you to expand your team—even if your money would be better spent elsewhere.

Studies show that AI live chat software can handle 69% of customer inquiries fully. That means you can quickly scale your business without having to expand your customer support teams drastically.

Customization

Your AI live chat software should have enough customization options to transform it into an extension of your brand.

That includes:

• Greeting messages
• Chatbot responses
• Tone, voice, and language
• Routing rules
• Chat window colors
• Chat icons

For example, Customerly’s live chat software was built from the ground up with customization in mind. You can tweak and adjust everything from how your live chat looks to core functionality like routing rules and smart triggers.

Integration

Integrations let your AI live chat software gain added functionality from other tools in your tech stack. Plus, two-way information flow means less time wasted on data input and transfer.

Look for integrations with:

• CRMs
• Help desk tools
• Marketing automation tools
• Communication tools

Alternatively, look for an all-in-one tool that combines many tools into a single platform. 

At Customerly, our live chat software is built directly into our CRM, helpdesk, and marketing automation tools for easy information sharing, collaboration, and more effective customer support. 

Pricing & Flexibility

Lastly, make sure any AI live chat software you’re considering can meet your needs at a price that’s fair and within your budget.

We’re not just talking about your present needs here—you need to think long-term. As your business scales, can the tool keep the pace without becoming unaffordable, or will you get stuck on an enterprise plan when all you need are a few extra monthly interactions?

Look for a range of plans that cater to growing businesses or flexible plans built around monthly interactions (like the ones we offer here at Customerly).

It’s time to get to our AI live chat software list. Here’s an overview of the tools we’ll be covering:

1. Customerly: For All-in-One AI-Assisted Customer Support
2. Intercom: For Conversational AI with Guardrails
3. Drift: For Natural Language Sales and Marketing
4. ChatBot: For Real-Time Generative Responses
5. Re:amaze: For Time-Saving AI Features
6. Tidio: For AI-Powered Ecommerce Support
7. Userlike: For Integrated, AI-Powered Live Chat & Knowledge Bases
8. Smartsupp:  For AI Personalization
9. Laiye: For Enterprise-Level Conversational AI
10. Aivo: For Experimental AI Live Chat Features

Ready to dive into the details? Let’s go.

For All-in-One (AI-Assisted) Customer Support

Customerly is an all-in-one tool that spans customer support, marketing automation, and, yes—AI live chat.

Let’s review the basics before we get to the AI features. 

Customerly’s live chat tool has everything you need to streamline customer support—smart triggers, live chat previews, canned responses, multimedia uploads, and an integrated help center for self-service options.

There are also a ton of AI-powered features designed to help you save time and provide better support faster (after all, that’s the point of AI).

You can generate whole or partial responses, provide smart suggestions, transform conversations into help-center articles, and even generate conversation summaries to pull concrete action items out of a sea of details.

Key Features

• AI ChatBot: Deploy in minutes the most powerful ChatBot with AI to reply with qualitative responses to your customers. Keep customers satisfied and escalate when a human is needed.
• AI Reply: Help your team Instantly generate entire responses to customer inquiries based on customer and company data.
• Write for Me: Transform your notes and outlines into fully-formed responses with the click of a button.
• AI Mission: Teach Aura to handle tasks from churn reduction to refund processing, ensuring consistent, accurate action.

• AI Summarize: Summarize complex conversations with AI to pull out conversation highlights, action items, and deep insights.
• Turn Support Exchanges into Articles: With the help of AI you can easily and quickly turn your support exchanges into ready-to-publish help center articles.
• Conversations Inbox: Manage live chat conversations, email messages, and Facebook messages in a shared team inbox.
• Team & Agent Reports: Monitor team performance, track individual agent stats, and generate custom reports.
• Analytics: Gain insights into knowledge gaps, customer sentiment, and trending topics.

Pricing

Customerly’s pricing is based on interactions. What is an interaction? As the name implies, an interaction is a valuable interaction your business has with a customer such as a new conversation (to which you reply) or an email sent. 

Each of our plans is designed to scale alongside your business from 1,000 monthly interactions to 1,000,000+.

Speaking of plans, we have five to choose from—Essential ($7/mo.), Startup ($39/mo.), Pro ($82/mo.), and Enterprise ($249/mo.). Higher-tier plans offer access to advanced features like surveys, team insights, and a multilanguage help center.

AI services are based on GPT and offer powerful management from complete support automation and specific missions hence the AI services are billed based on consumption every month.

Customerly observes an average of $0.45 per conversation handled by AI.

For Conversational AI with Safeguards

Intercom is a well-known customer service platform that recently introduced an AI live chat assistant (Fin AI).

The Intercom platform includes omnichannel messaging, helpdesk features, and proactive support tools. Fin fits into the equation by offering customers reliable, on-demand answers to their questions through natural language responses.

The tool can recommend help-center articles, avoid answering potentially risky questions, ask clarifying questions, and route inquiries to the right team.

Key Features

• Safeguards: Define topics and questions you want Fin AI to avoid answering.
• Transparent Conversations: View all Fin AI’s conversations in your inbox alongside your other messages.
• Issue Triage: Use Fin AI to gain insights into complex requests and use those details to route customers to the right agent.

Pricing

Intercom’s pricing is more complex than the pricing page suggests (we wrote a whole blog post on it if you’re looking for the details).

There are three base paid plans for you to choose from—Starter ($79/mo), Pro $100+/mo), and Premium ($400+/mo). However things get complicated when you consider add-ons like Fin AI, additional seats, and Reach.

Fin AI will cost you $0.99 per resolution (not per interaction or deflection). This can add up quickly for companies with a high volume of support inquiries. For example, assuming a 50% AI resolution rate and 1,000 queries per month, you’re looking at an additional $500 added to your monthly bill.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Offers a user-friendly interface
• Allows for multichannel communication
• Integrates with various tools and apps

Cons

• Intercom’s pricing can be expensive (and confusing)
• Installation and setup can be tedious
• Some users have reported slow response times and inadequate support

For Natural Language Sales and Marketing

Drift is a platform that offers sales and marketing support through AI-powered chatbots.

Drift’s AI was trained on a massive dataset of over 100 million B2B conversations to provide quick, human-like responses to common customer inquiries. 

What really sets Drift’s AI apart is its ability to qualify and nurture leads through conversations while delivering insights into intent, motivation, and top conversion strategies. This data can be used to fine-tune your sales and marketing efforts—including when and where to follow up with leads.

Key Features 

• Conversational AI: Nurture leads and respond to customer inquiries quickly and accurately with AI-powered chatbots.
• Qualification: Use the data collected from conversations to qualify leads and discover which sources yield the best results.
• Analytics and Insights: View data on chatbot performance, landing pages, and customer behavior to improve your engagement strategies.

Pricing

AI chatbots are only available on Drift’s Enterprise plan. You’ll need to contact sales for an accurate quote.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• The software is easy to manage 
• Customer support is helpful and responsive
• The tool helps handle customers in a fast and effective way

Cons

• Can be expensive
• The software can be slow to load at times
• Setup and configuration is difficult

For Real-Time Generative Responses

ChatBot is an AI-powered chatbot tool from the maker of LiveChat.

The tool offers a range of options for training your AI model. You can connect your website, chat archives, knowledge base, helpdesk, and other resources. You can then tweak your model and expand its coverage by manually adding skills and topics, like gathering customer feedback, for example.

Once trained, ChatBot can start providing human-like responses to customer queries similar to the ones it was trained on.

Key Features

• Visual Builder: Build highly customizable chatbot flows with a no-code visual builder.
• Diverse Training Methods: Train your model on website data, chat archives, and more.
• AI-Powered: Leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) to provide human-like answers.

Pricing

ChatBot offers four different paid plans to choose from—Starter ($52/mo), Team ($142/mo), Business ($424/mo), and Enterprise (custom).

Higher-tier plans offer more live chatbots and more monthly chats. The Team plan is a good starting point with five chatbots and up to 5,000 chats monthly. 

When you exceed your monthly limit, every chat costs $0.01 (regardless of the resolution).

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Offers an all-in-one platform to create, deploy, and track chatbots
• Simple pricing model
• Allows for multiple chatbots with different voices, use cases, and knowledge

Cons

• Lacks guardrails to prevent inappropriate responses.
• Some users have reported that reporting could be improved
• It can be difficult to set up and configure

For Time-Saving AI Features

Re:amaze is an integrated customer service, live chat, and helpdesk platform with AI live chat features designed to save customer service reps time.

The main AI feature here is text formality and length adjustments—you quickly write your message, and the AI engine will automatically adjust it to match the level of formality and depth you need.

Beyond that, there’s also AI-powered intent identification. This feature uses language cues to sort customer inquiries into neat categories (e.g., shipping questions) to ensure it reaches the right reps.

Key Features

• AI Response: Deliver polished and professional responses with the help of AI-generated suggestions.
• AI Intent: Automatically understand customer intent and categorize inquiries.
• Automation: Set up automated workflows to route messages and assign tasks quickly.

Pricing

Re:amaze offers three paid plans—Basic ($29/user/mo), Pro ($49/user/mo), and Plus ($69/user/mo)—all of which offer the AI features above.

Pro offers a good balance of features and is suitable for most businesses. The Plus plan is designed for larger teams with features like departments and performance reporting.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Very easy to use once you find your bearings
• Wide range of pricing options
• The SaaS app is very stable

Cons

• Knowledge base editor can be difficult to use
• Steep learning curve
• The mobile app can be unstable

For AI-Powered Ecommerce Support

Tidio combines AI-powered live chat with a range of e-commerce integrations to give consumers a personalized shopping experience.

Lyro (Tidio’s AI) can be integrated with your Shopify or WordPress store for instant customer and order data access. This allows Tidio’s chatbots to answer customer questions regarding order statuses, shipping times, and more without relying on human input.

And even without these integrations, Lyro can still be trained with in-house company data to provide human-like responses to a range of common queries.

Key Features

• Reply Assistant: Turn basic responses into professional ones with the click of a button and make sure every agent is always on-brand.
• Smart Views: Analyze conversations and organize them based on customer intent to easily spot and prioritize important requests.
• Tracker: Evaluate support conversations by analyzing customer intent and satisfaction levels to help you identify areas for improvement.

Pricing

Tidio’s pricing is based on products and add-ons.

Lyro starts at €35/mo for 50 conversations and maxes out at €140/mo for 200 conversations (in addition to the monthly cost of the products you pair it with). Tidio+ starts at €340/mo and allows you to customize the number of monthly Lyro conversations.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Integrates with Messenger, Instagram, and email
• Provides a simple and intuitive interface
• Offers scalable plans that don’t require you to purchase unnecessary features

Cons

• Chat notifications can be unreliable
• It may not be as comprehensive as other options

For Integrated, AI-Powered Live Chat & Knowledge Bases

Userlike is a no-code AI-powered chatbot tool that centralizes your company’s knowledge base and uses it to provide accurate, on-demand support.

The live chat feature is embeddable on any website and supports a range of channels, including SMS, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. AI recognizes customer intent across all supported channels and directs them to guides, help-center articles, FAQs, and product pages that match the intent.

Questions that the AI can’t help with are automatically routed to human reps.

Key Features

• Connected Knowledge Base: Connect any knowledge base to give your chatbot access to articles, FAQs, product pages, and more.
• Multi-Channel Support: Manage customer conversations across multiple channels from one place.
• Simple Routing: Route unanswered questions automatically to human reps for further assistance.

Pricing

Userlike offers a free plan, but for the AI chatbot, you’ll need to skip straight to Corporate (£290/mo). Flex (custom) includes these features, a dedicated success manager, and intelligent routing.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Simple and intuitive management interface
• Clean and easy-to-use live chat widget for users
• Quick to install and use

Cons

• Offline messages are unreliable
• Slack integration is not well developed

For AI Personalization

Smartsup is a sales-focused live chat and chatbot product that will release an AI live chat product shortly.

According to Smartsupp, the AI live chat tool will be trained on product and CRM data to give customers a highly personalized experience spanning product recommendations, targeted offers and discounts, and on-demand support. It will also help lighten the burden of customer care teams by assisting customers with routine tasks like password resets.

Key Features

• AI Product Recommendations: Recommend products based on customer data and purchase history.
• Targeted Offers & Discounts: Personalize offers and discounts based on customer data.
• On-Demand Support: Automatically answer common queries and free up the customer care team for more complex tasks.

Pricing

AI chatbots will only be available on Pro ($48+/mo) and Ultimate (custom) plans as an add-on.

At the moment, access to this feature is still limited. You can join the waitlist or contact sales for more information.

For Enterprise-Level Conversational AI

Laiye is an automation platform with products that streamline customer interactions through human-machine collaboration.

Laiye’s Conversational AI product uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) to automate customer interactions across thousands of industries and use cases—sales, customer service, lead generation, etc. After every interaction, the AI automatically grades its performance based on the outcome to improve with time.

It also collects detailed data to give business insights into areas for improvement, knowledge gaps, common customer requests, and more.

Key Features

• Advanced NLP technology
• Insightful analytics
• Connect with other automation components

Pricing

Laiye doesn’t publish pricing information, so you’ll need to contact sales for more information. That being said, they do provide a free trial that lasts 30 days, so you can easily test the waters before deciding to invest your money.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Highly scalable
• Very reliable
• Customer support is highly responsive

Cons

• UI is a bit outdated
• Language capabilities are somewhat limited

For Experimental AI Live Chat Features

Aivo is a conversational AI platform that combines conversational chatbots with AI copilot features for human agents.

The full Conversational AI suite includes many AI-powered live chat features, notably including Video Conversational AI—a tool that transforms AI-generated responses into fully voiced videos. The standard AI chatbot (Agentbot) is trained on company data and can accurately respond to customer queries across a range of critical channels.

Key Features

• Video Conversational AI: Transform static images into fully voiced and animated videos to communicate AI-generated responses in a humanized way.
• Agentbot: Fully automate the process of responding to basic customer queries using an AI model trained on your data.
• Analytics: Dive into the data to measure AI performance and improve your model.

Pricing

You’ll need to contact sales for accurate pricing information.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• User-friendly design
• Very scalable

Cons

• Customer service can be slow to respond
• Pricing could be more transparent

AI live chat software is in its early stages.

The tools businesses have available today are already transforming a wide range of traditionally human processes—from marketing to sales, customer service, and more. Everyone benefits when you eliminate some of the busy work that comes with customer interactions.

At Customerly, we give businesses a centralized tool for managing customer relationships in one place. With integrated CRM, helpdesk, marketing automation, and AI-powered live chat, all the features and information you need to deliver remarkable experiences are at your fingertips.

Experience the benefits of AI live chat first-hand. Sign up for a Customerly account for a 14-day free trial.