Human handoff lets a member of your team step into a conversation the assistant is having, answer as themselves, and hand it back.
It is off until you switch it on. Turning human handoff on covers that; this article covers what you are switching on.
The three states
Every conversation is in exactly one of them.
| State | Who answers | How it got there |
|---|---|---|
| Bot | The assistant | Where every conversation starts |
| Waiting | The assistant, still | Somebody asked for a person, nobody has arrived |
| With a person | An operator | Someone took it over |
The middle row is the one worth reading twice. The assistant keeps answering while a request is waiting. A visitor who asks for help and is met with silence has been punished for asking, so the assistant carries on until somebody is genuinely in the room. It goes quiet only then.
Three ways into a handoff
All landing in the same place:
- The visitor asks. A “Talk to a person” control sits above the message box whenever you are available.
- The assistant asks. It fetches a person when it cannot resolve something, when the visitor asks in words rather than by clicking, or when the matter needs authority it does not have — refunds, complaints, anything where money moves.
- You jump in. Open any conversation and press Take over, or simply reply. Replying takes it over, because requiring a click first ends with the assistant answering on top of you mid-sentence.
Three ways out
- You hand it back, with the control in the conversation header.
- You close the conversation.
- Nobody arrives in time. After the timeout the assistant takes it back and tells the visitor plainly that nobody was available, rather than leaving them watching a spinner.
The visitor can follow along
Every one of those transitions appears as a line in the conversation — “Sarah joined the conversation”, “You are back with the assistant” — so a thread read back a week later still makes sense.
While a person is answering, the visitor sees that person’s name and picture instead of the AI marker. When the assistant resumes, it can see everything that was said while you were in there.
Who can take a conversation over
Anyone with the reply to conversations capability — the same permission that already lets somebody answer in the inbox. There is no separate role to grant.
Where to go next
Turning human handoff on for the settings, and Before you switch handoff on for the two things to decide first.
