Most people build their first embed in the wrong order. They configure it, paste the snippet, load the page, and get a login wall where the chat box should be.
The embed is almost never the problem. It is one setting on the document, and settling it first will save you an afternoon.
Check the access level before you copy any code
Every sharing and embedding method delivers visitors to the same chat. So the document's access level decides whether those visitors can use it.
If the document is not public, the share card tells you so directly with a warning naming the current level and what it will do to your visitors. A Registered Users Only document sends anonymous arrivals to a sign-in page. A Passcode document asks them for a passcode you have not given them. Owner Group Only and Owner Admins Only simply will not work for outsiders at all.
For an embed that anyone can use, the document needs to be Public, which is itself a paid feature. Everything below assumes you have done that.
Link and QR code
The simplest sharing is on the Embed & Share tab. Share URL is a direct link with a copy button, and beside it a QR code encoding the same link, downloadable at high resolution for posters, slides and printed handouts.
Two details make this better than it looks. If your organization has a custom domain, the link is generated on your domain rather than ours, so what people scan and paste is your brand. And the QR code updates automatically if the document's web address changes, which means the poster you printed does not quietly become a dead end.
Three ways to embed
All three work by pasting a small snippet into your page. Nothing else is needed on the Docutrain side.
| Type | Best for | How it appears |
|---|---|---|
| Button | Landing pages and content sites | A call-to-action button that opens the chat in a fullscreen slide-in panel |
| Inline | Help pages and knowledge-base sections | The full chat sits directly in your page layout |
| API | Custom interfaces built by your developers | Whatever your team builds |
Button comes with a live preview and the options you would want: button color, the call-to-action text, and whether to show the document title above, below or beside the button. Get the preview right, copy the code, done.
Inline drops the chat into the page with no button or bubble, streamlined so it stays focused on the one document, in a frame your web team can size.
API is a ready-made example for developers connecting straight to a document's assistant, streaming included. It is an Unlimited-plan capability. If all you want is chat on a page, the other two need no development work at all.
Whichever you use, visitors get the real thing: references, keyword suggestions, downloads and your branding, without leaving your site. It works on any domain, and messages are accepted only from Docutrain's own address, so the embed cannot be driven by whatever else is running on the page.
Saved embeds, and why they are different
Floating chat bubbles and document galleries are built somewhere else, in the dashboard's Embeds tab, and the reason is the whole point of them.
A saved embed keeps its own configuration. Change the color, the greeting or the filters, press publish, and every page carrying that snippet updates within about a minute. Nobody re-pastes anything. If your assistant is on eleven pages of a marketing site, that difference is the feature.
They are available on Business and above. If a plan lapses, embeds you already published keep serving, and you can list, deactivate and delete them but not create new ones.
The publishing model is a proper draft workflow rather than live editing. Edits save themselves as a draft a moment after you stop typing, with a note explaining that publishing is what updates live pages. Discard changes returns you to whatever is currently serving. The status column tells you where each one stands: Draft, Published, Unpublished changes, or Inactive.
Two warnings worth reading before you act rather than after.
Deleting an embed destroys its key permanently. The key is never reissued, so any snippet already pasted onto a website stops working, and there is no way to bring it back. For the same reason, a document cannot be moved to a different owner while saved embeds point at it.
A chat bubble's target document cannot be changed later. If you need it pointing somewhere else, create another embed. Duplicating an existing one gives you a draft copy with a fresh key, which is usually the fastest route.
Bubbles and galleries
A chat bubble is the floating widget: hex colors for the button, header and header text, a position of bottom left or bottom right, header text, an optional greeting, an optional avatar, and a toggle for the document title.
A gallery is the more interesting one. It puts your library on an external site, fronted by your assistant character's avatar, name and intro, drawn from your owner-level branding.
You filter what appears by categories, documents and years. Categories are matched by identity rather than by name, so renaming a category later will not silently empty your gallery, which is the kind of detail you only appreciate after it has gone wrong somewhere else.
Then you decide how much of it visitors can drive. Multi-document chat lets them pick up to twenty documents and ask across all of them. Chat with category puts a control on each category, as image tiles, a compact tree, or an expanded list, opening a chat scoped to that category with a welcome that names it. The heading accepts a {name} placeholder to drop in your character's name.
The published gallery fetches documents at display time and applies your access rules as it goes. Anything hidden from public view stays hidden, so a gallery cannot leak a document by being cached at a moment when it was public.
If you built one before
Widgets configured on the old Widget tab, and galleries built in Owner Settings, keep working, and their settings were carried across. Both old builders are retired, and their former homes now point at the Embeds tab.
If your assistants should also reach people who never visit your site at all, Slack, Telegram and custom domains covers the other half.