Product · 2024
An AI support layer that sounds like the brand, not the vendor.
Chatloom is the AI chat product we built for teams drowning in repetitive support tickets. Faster answers, fewer humans on "did you try turning it off".
Role
Product design & build
Year
2024
Stack
Next.js, OpenAI, Supabase
Scope
Product UI, admin, marketing
Context
Every AI chatbot on the market sounds the same; the same polite robotic preamble, the same "I'd be happy to help with that," the same sterile gray bubble. Customers smell it. It breaks trust before the conversation starts.
We wanted Chatloom to feel like it was part of the brand that deployed it. Configurable voice, configurable tone, configurable refusal behaviour; and a product surface that isn't another SaaS dashboard.
The challenge
The challenge
AI chat is an easy category to enter and a hard category to stay in. We weren't trying to beat the big names on raw model quality; we were trying to beat them on feel, setup speed, and how little a small team has to wrestle with it. Product design as positioning.
How we built it
A product with a personality.
A chat surface that respects the site
Most chatbot widgets stamp a bright logo over your layout. Chatloom inherits the host site's type and radius, reads the accent color from the page, and lives in a panel shaped like it belongs there. It stops being a widget and starts being a room.
Voice is a first-class setting
Instead of burying tone controls in an advanced panel, voice is the first thing you configure. Formal, friendly, deadpan, playful; with live preview, not abstract sliders. You write one example message in your brand tone and Chatloom mirrors it from there.
Refusal as a designed moment
Most chatbots fail the interesting moment; when they don't know the answer; with a scripted "I can't help with that." We designed the refusal flow as a first-class experience: graceful handoff, captured context, a real human picks up where the bot stopped. No dead ends.
Setup in an afternoon
No SDKs, no ticket to a solutions engineer. Paste a script tag, upload a PDF or a URL, answer five questions about tone. You're live before lunch ends. We design every onboarding screen as if the user is about to give up.
Product surfaces
The product, at rest.
What we shipped
Deliverables
Outcome
A chat product that stops feeling like a chatbot.
Chatloom landed with teams who were tired of bolt-on AI widgets. The voice configuration gets used on day one; the handoff flow gets used in week one; and the support load drops without the support team having to apologize for a robot. It's the difference between AI that's deployed and AI that's adopted.
Personality ships faster than features.
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