An AI chatbot for a small business in India has to answer from what the business has published, take a phone number when it cannot, and cope with customers who type in Hinglish. Chatterbox does those three things, installs with one script tag, and starts free.
A customer finds your interior work on Instagram at half past ten, opens your website, and wants to know whether you take up flats in Zirakpur and what a two-bedroom job costs. You are asleep. The form on your contact page asks for a name, an email and a message, and it will sit in an inbox until tomorrow afternoon.
That gap is the whole reason a small business in India looks at a chatbot. Not deflection, not ticket volume, not the problems a support team of forty has. One customer, one question, nobody at the desk.
What a small Indian business needs a chatbot to do
Three things, and the rest is decoration.
It has to answer from your own material. Your rates, your service area, your timings, your return policy. A bot that answers from the open internet will describe a business that sounds like yours and is not yours.
It has to take a phone number. Indian customers give a number sooner than an email, and you will call them back rather than write. A chatbot that ends a conversation with "please email us" has thrown away the enquiry it was built to catch.
It has to survive the way people type. "kitna hoga", "do you deliver to Panchkula pin 134109", "same day possible?", half English and half Hindi in Roman script, no punctuation. If the bot only understands a well-formed English sentence, it will fail on most of your traffic.
Where Chatterbox fits
Chatterbox is a chat widget for your website. You give it your content, it answers visitors from that content, and it shows which passage each answer came from, so a strange reply is traceable to the page that produced it.
You feed it four ways: crawl your site, upload a document, paste text, or type question-and-answer pairs by hand. That last option matters more than it looks. The answers a small business gives on the phone twenty times a week are usually the ones its website never wrote down.
When its material does not cover a question, Chatterbox says so and asks for a name and phone number instead of inventing a figure. The lead lands in your dashboard and your inbox. You call in the morning with the actual number for that actual job, which is what you would have done anyway, except the customer did not leave to check the next search result first.
It replies in English, Hindi and Hinglish out of the box, including questions that mix all three in one line. The language page covers where that holds and where it thins out.
Installing it on the website you already have
One script tag before the closing </body> tag. No plugin, no npm, no build step, and the widget stays under 15KB, which matters when your visitor is on a mid-range Android phone on a patchy 4G connection in a basement showroom.
That works on a static HTML site from 2019, on WordPress under cPanel, on a custom PHP site nobody wants to touch, and on a Shopify theme. If you can edit one file and save it, you can finish the install.
What it costs, and what it does not cost
Pricing is flat and in rupees. Free is ₹0 and covers a 2-page crawl with 100 answered questions a month, with no card. Starter is ₹999 a month for a 10-page crawl, 2,000 answered questions and a second language. Pro is ₹2,999 a month for 10,000 answered questions and more languages. Extra crawl pages cost ₹500 for ten.
Nothing is priced per agent, so the bill does not move when a second person starts using the dashboard. Every plan is capped: when you hit the monthly allowance, the widget keeps collecting leads and stops answering until the allowance resets or you upgrade. You do not get a surprise invoice. The pricing page goes through the plans and the usual hidden charges in the category.
Be honest about the limit
Chatterbox answers from published material, which means a thin website produces a thin chatbot. If your prices live in a PDF nobody linked, or your delivery area exists only in your head, the bot will keep asking visitors for their number and you will keep making the same calls.
The fix is an afternoon with your own site rather than a better model. The content checklist is the list to work through before you switch anything on. Most businesses that do it find the website got better whether or not the chatbot went live.
When you are ready, start on the Free plan. It takes no card, and you will know within an hour whether your content is good enough to answer with.