If you run a small product, your support inbox is mostly the same ten questions. "How do I cancel?", "Does it work on iPhone?", "I paid but nothing happened." You already wrote those answers — in your help docs, your FAQ page, your onboarding emails. You're just retyping them by hand, every day.
This guide shows you how to stop. You'll wire your inbox to a chatbot trained on your own content, so every incoming support email gets an answer drafted automatically, in your words, from your docs.
No code. One Zap. About 15 minutes.
What you're building
The flow has three pieces:
- Gmail notices a new email in your support inbox
- Zapier sends the email's subject and body to the MagicChat API
- MagicChat answers from your indexed docs, and Zapier drops that answer back into Gmail as a draft reply
The important word is draft. You stay in the loop — you read the draft, hit send if it's right, edit it if it isn't. That single choice is what makes this safe to turn on today instead of "someday when I trust it."
Once you've watched a few hundred drafts go out unedited, you can flip the last step from "Create Draft Reply" to "Reply to Email" and let it run fully hands-off.
Step 1: Train the bot on your support content
Before automating anything, the bot needs to know your product.
Create a bot in MagicChat and add your sources:
- Your website URL — it crawls and indexes the pages
- Your help center or FAQ pages
- PDFs — onboarding guides, policy docs, price sheets
- A YouTube walkthrough, if you have one
Indexing runs on its own. When it's done, open the bot's chat page and ask it your five most common support questions. If the answers are good there, they'll be good in email. If they're vague, that's a content gap — add the missing doc and re-index before you build the Zap.
This step is the whole game. The automation is plumbing; the quality of the reply is entirely down to what you fed it.
Step 2: Grab your bot ID
The MagicChat API identifies your bot with a bot_id.
Open your bot in the dashboard and click Show Embed Info. You'll see the widget script tag:
<script src="https://www.script.magicchat.ai/js/widget.min.js" id="YOUR_BOT_ID"></script>
The value in id is your bot ID. It's also in the dashboard URL when you have the bot open. Copy it — you'll paste it into Zapier in a minute.
Step 3: The API call, in one request
Here's the entire API surface you need. One endpoint, no API key, no OAuth:
curl -X POST https://www.magicchat.ai/api/public/ask-ai-query \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"bot_id": "YOUR_BOT_ID",
"query": "How do I cancel my subscription?"
}'
The response:
{
"answer": "Cancel anytime from Settings → Billing → Cancel subscription.",
"contextString": "...the indexed passages the answer was built from...",
"prompt": "...the assembled prompt..."
}
answer is the only field you map into your reply. The other two are the retrieved context and the assembled prompt — useful when you're debugging why an answer came out wrong, and worth ignoring the rest of the time.
That's it. bot_id plus query in, answer out. Everything below is just teaching Zapier to make that one request.
Step 4: Build the Zap
Trigger — Gmail: New Email Matching Search
Pick Gmail as the trigger app and New Email Matching Search as the event. Connect your support inbox.
Use a search string instead of "any new email" so you don't burn tasks on newsletters and Stripe receipts:
to:support@yourdomain.com is:unread -from:noreply -label:promotions
Narrow is your friend here. Start with one label or one alias, prove it works, then widen.
Action — Webhooks by Zapier: POST
Add an action step, choose Webhooks by Zapier, event POST.
Fill in:
- URL:
https://www.magicchat.ai/api/public/ask-ai-query - Payload Type:
json - Data:
bot_id→ your bot ID from Step 2query→ map the Gmail fields. Use the Subject field, then the Body Plain field, in the same box so the bot sees the full question.
- Headers:
Content-Type→application/json
Test the step. You want a response containing answer with real text in it. If you get Invalid bot_id, the ID is wrong or has a stray space — that's the only thing that error means.
One caveat worth knowing before you start: Webhooks by Zapier is a premium app, so it needs a paid Zapier plan (Starter, currently $19.99/mo, and up). If you're on the free plan, skip to the Make and n8n section below — both do the same HTTP call without the paywall.
Action — Gmail: Create Draft Reply
Add a second action: Gmail, event Create Draft Reply.
- Thread / Message: the message from your trigger step
- Body: the
answerfield from the webhook step - From: your support alias
Turn the Zap on. Send yourself a test question from another address and watch the draft appear in the thread.
Step 5: The guardrails that make this survivable
Three things worth adding before you leave it running:
Add a Filter step. Put a Zapier Filter between the webhook and Gmail so a low-confidence answer never becomes a draft. Don't guess at the phrase, though — find it first. Ask your bot three questions it has no content for and read what it actually says. Whatever that phrasing turns out to be ("I'm not sure", "I don't have information about that", something else), filter on it. A bot that doesn't know shouldn't be drafting anything; that email should hit a human untouched.
Label what the bot touched. Add a Gmail "Add Label to Email" action tagging the thread ai-drafted. After a week you can search that label and read every draft it wrote in one sitting. That's your quality review.
Watch what still needs a human. The questions the bot punts on are your content gaps. Every one you answer in your docs is one less email forever.
What this costs at your volume
Both bills scale with the same number — how many support emails you actually get. Put yours in and the rest falls out:
What will this cost you?
Drag to your real support volume. Everything below is calculated from it.
That's 1,200 emails a month.
On Zapier instead? Two tasks an email means 2,400 tasks a month, which lands on Professional at $69/mo billed annually — $57 more than the option above, for the same three steps. Webhooks by Zapier is a premium app, so there's no free option there.
Start on LitePoint a chatbot at your help docs and let it draft your support replies.
Build your chatbot freeDoing it on Make or n8n instead
Nothing here is Zapier-specific. It's one HTTP POST, so any automation tool works — and if the premium-app pricing is a blocker, these are the moves:
Make.com — Gmail "Watch Emails" module → HTTP "Make a request" module (POST, URL above, JSON body with bot_id and query) → Gmail "Create a Draft" module. Make bills per module run, so this flow costs about 3 credits per email. The free tier gives you 1,000 credits a month and a 15-minute minimum run interval; Core ($12/mo billed annually) raises that to 10,000 credits and 1-minute scheduling. At a few dozen support emails a day you want Core.
n8n — Gmail Trigger node → HTTP Request node → Gmail node. Self-host it and the whole thing costs you nothing but the server.
Zoho / Pipedream / Power Automate — same three-step shape. Trigger, HTTP POST, draft.
Beyond Gmail
The same endpoint answers anything that can make an HTTP request. Once the email flow is running, the cheap wins are:
- Helpdesk tickets — Freshdesk, Zoho Desk, or Help Scout ticket created → API call → post the answer as a private note for your agent
- Slack — a question in your
#supportchannel → API call → threaded reply - WhatsApp Business — inbound message → API call → auto-reply
- Contact forms — form submission → API call → instant answer email before your team even sees it
One indexed bot, one endpoint, every channel.
FAQ
Do I need an API key?
No. The public ask endpoint takes your bot_id and nothing else, which is why this works as a no-code webhook. The same ID is already public in your website widget.
Will it invent answers? It builds answers from the passages it retrieves out of your indexed sources, so a well-covered question stays grounded in your content. A question your docs don't cover is the risky one — that's where a model can reach for general knowledge instead. Which is exactly why two things in this guide aren't optional: test your top questions before you go live, and keep the filter in Step 5 so an unsure answer never becomes a draft.
Can it send replies automatically instead of drafting them? Yes — swap the Gmail action from "Create Draft Reply" to "Reply to Email." Run it in draft mode for a couple of weeks first. You'll learn more from reading the drafts than from any setting.
How does it stay current when my product changes? Re-index the source after you update your docs. The bot answers from the newly indexed content immediately — you don't rebuild the Zap.
How many emails can it handle? The API isn't the bottleneck. Your automation tool's task quota is — Zapier counts each step as a task, so a three-step Zap costs three tasks per email. Make and n8n price the same work differently, which is another reason to check them before committing.
Start with your top ten
Don't try to automate the whole inbox on day one. Take the ten questions you answer most, make sure your docs cover all ten properly, and point the Zap at the alias where those questions land.
Ten questions answered automatically is already most of your support volume. The long tail is what your team is actually for.