A: Hi! 👋

Thank you for the questions, happy to help.

1. That's correct, you create an AI chatbot on Tiny Talk, add your documents to create your bots' knowledge base, you can then embed this in your website or integrate it with WhatsApp. When you do this you couple a phone number with the bot you created. Anybody sending WhatsApp messages to that phone number will get a reply from your AI chatbot. Tiny Talk also offers a Help Desk functionality, where you can see the conversations taking place between your chatbot and your users. And if desired, you can take over that conversation and reply to your user yourself. When you're done, you can hand-off the conversation back to AI chatbot.

2. You need to provide a phone number, this is generally a dedicated phone number you need to purchase. WhatsApp does not allow same phone number connecting to more than 1 client, meaning you can use a phone number either on a WhatsApp mobile app, or on the API. You don't need to provide your own WhatsApp API. We use the official onboarding flow, you login with your Facebook account and create your WhatsApp Business Account, register your phone number, verify and that's pretty much about it. You can get a phone number from your local telecom provider or using an online service. We recommend using "bird.com", it's around $1 per month for a phone number depending on your origin country.

3. Yes there are potential costs, first is the cost of having a phone number, second cost is from WhatsApp itself. They charge based on certain facts, like country and conversation category and also give 1,000 free service conversations each month.

Please find more accurate information here: https://business.whatsapp.com/products/platform-pricing

Hope this helps and let us know if we can clarify anything further.

All the best,
Oscar