Your AStream live chat is a full engagement surface. You greet attendees, answer questions the moment they land, hand objections to your team, and even let AI carry the routine replies while you present. This guide ties every one of those abilities together in one place so you can decide who answers your chat, and how. | In this guide: Chat modes at a glance Moderating live from the Support Portal Answering chat from Slack Letting AI answer with OpenAI or Claude Scheduled auto-chat and simulated Q&A Who should answer your chat? |
Overview
On an AStream event, chat is where your audience talks back. A registrant can ask a question, raise an objection, or simply say hello, and how you handle that moment often decides whether they buy. AStream gives you a genuine control room for it: reply to everyone or to one person privately, fire off one-tap canned answers, flag the messages that matter, remove a disruptive attendee, mirror the whole conversation into Slack for your team, or let OpenAI or Claude answer the common questions for you.
This article is the hub. Each ability below links out to a focused guide for the step-by-step setup, so you always know where the full instructions live.
Chat modes at a glance
Before anyone can chat, you choose how chat behaves for the event. AStream offers three modes:
Disabled - there's no chat interface on the event at all.
Show All Chat to Everyone - every attendee sees every message, so the audience talks to each other and to your support team openly.
Only Support Sees Attendee Messages - each attendee's messages stay private between that person and your support team, which keeps the room calm while still letting you help everyone one-to-one.
You can also turn on Show Timestamp to display when each message was sent, and set a Support Reply Name (the name attendees see on your replies, "Support" by default).
You set all of this under your AStream Stream Viewer settings. For the full walkthrough, see our AStream Settings guide. This article picks up where setup ends: how you actually run the conversation once the event is live.
Moderating and replying live from the Support Portal
The Support Portal is your live control room. It opens from the floating headphone launcher in the lower-right corner of AEvents App Home Page: click it, then choose Open Support.
You can even share the portal link with a teammate so they can help during the event without ever signing in to your AEvent account. For the full tour of the portal, see Using YOUR AEvent Support Center.
From inside the portal, here's what you can do to any attendee message:
Reply publicly to everyone - your answer appears in the shared chat for the whole room to see. Great for questions the whole audience is wondering about.
Reply privately to one attendee - use Send Privately to answer a single person directly. Switch back to Send to All when you want the room to see your reply again. This is perfect for handling a personal billing question without broadcasting it.
Fire a canned reply - answer your most common questions in one tap from a dropdown of pre-written replies, so a busy chat never gets ahead of you. You build these in your campaign's Advanced section; see Support Canned Responses.
Delete a message - remove an individual message from the chat when it doesn't belong there.
Priority-flag a message - mark a message with a three-state flag (normal, green, or red for urgent) so the questions that matter most stand out while you work through a fast-moving room.
Kick Asker - remove a disruptive attendee from the live event immediately. For Zoom-delivered events this also removes them from the Zoom session.
Important: Kick Asker is a permanent ban. It removes the attendee from the event right away and blocks them, rather than muting them for a moment. If you need to reverse it, you undo the ban from your Leads page by reactivating (unbanning) that attendee, as described in our Managing Leads guide. Reach for Kick Asker only when someone is genuinely disrupting your event.
Want your replies to show a team name instead of "Support"? You can rename the reply name that attendees see; see Customizing Your Support Reply Name.
Answering chat from Slack
You don't have to sit inside the event to answer chat. AEvent can pipe every attendee question straight into a Slack channel, and any reply you type back in that Slack thread lands right in the attendee's live chat. Your team can monitor and answer from wherever they already work, even from a phone, and you never miss a question during a running evergreen event.
The essentials to switch it on:
Connect the Slack integration in AEvent (Integrations, then Add Integration, then Slack) and authorize your workspace.
Invite the AEvent app into the exact channel you want to use by typing
/addin that channel and selecting AEvent.In your campaign, set Slack to Active, open its settings, choose the channel, and turn on notifications for new messages (you can also be alerted on new registrations and on attendees joining or leaving).
Your canned replies show up as a dropdown inside Slack too, so your team can answer common questions there just as fast as in the portal. For the complete step-by-step setup and the two-way reply flow, see our Slack integration guide.
Letting AI answer with OpenAI or Claude
When the same questions come up event after event, you can hand them to an AI assistant that answers live in chat under your Support name. You connect either OpenAI or Claude, point it at a Google Sheet of your questions and answers, and turn on the Reply to Registrant Chat Messages action in your campaign. From then on, when an attendee asks a question, the assistant answers instantly from your sheet, freeing your team to focus on presenting and closing. You or your team can still jump into the chat at any time; the AI just takes the repetitive load off.
A few things worth knowing:
The assistant answers questions, so a message reads as a question when it includes a question mark or a word like what, which, where, why, or how.
It runs during your live events (AStream, and Zoom Meetings or Webinars).
Keep your Google Sheet clean and free of any personal attendee data, since anything in the sheet is fair game for the assistant to repeat back.
OpenAI or Claude? Both work the same way and draw from your Q&A sheet. OpenAI runs on a fast default model. Claude adds one extra choice: when you set it up, you pick which Claude model to use, so you can lean on a faster model for high-volume chat or a more capable one for nuanced questions and objections. Pick whichever account you already have.
Scheduled auto-chat and simulated Q&A
Not every chat message needs a live human. With a timeline action, you can schedule a chat message to send to your audience at a chosen moment during the event, using your Support name and personalization like the attendee's first name. You can even simulate a natural back-and-forth: send a message that reads as a question from another attendee, with a reply from Support, to warm up the room and answer common objections before anyone even asks.
Setting up a single scheduled message is covered in our AStream guide, and you can bulk-load many messages at once from a CSV with Import Auto Chat Messages.
Who should answer your chat?
Here's the whole picture in one view, so you can mix and match to fit each event:
You, in the Support Portal - full live control: public or private replies, canned answers, priority flags, delete, and Kick Asker.
Your team, in Slack - answer from where your team already works, with two-way replies and canned answers built in.
One-tap canned replies - your frequent answers, ready in a dropdown in both the portal and Slack.
AI, with OpenAI or Claude - the assistant handles the common questions live from your Q&A sheet, so your team is free for the moments that need a human.