Is your Tawk.to chatbot EU AI Act ready?

Tawk.to and Article 50, briefly

Tawk is free and therefore sits on an enormous number of small sites, often installed years ago and untouched since. The classic setup is live chat with a person, which Article 50(1) does not cover. Since Tawk started offering an AI assistant, though, the same widget can quietly have become an AI interaction without anyone deciding so.

What our scans found on Tawk.to sites

We have not yet scanned enough sites where Tawk.to was the first widget we detected to say anything meaningful here. As soon as the sample is large enough it will appear, counts included. We would rather publish nothing than a percentage based on two sites.

How we detect Tawk.to

Our scanner looks for these signals on your public page. Two independent signals are required for a match, so a blog post that merely names the vendor does not count.

Script hosts

embed.tawk.tova.tawk.to

JS globals

window.Tawk_API

DOM selectors

#tawkchat-container.tawk-min-container

Where the AI notice goes in Tawk.to

Administration, Chat Widget, Content, welcome message or triggers. Tawk uses triggers for the opening message, so look there if the text does not change.

1. 1

   Log in to dashboard.tawk.to and pick your property.

2. 2

   Go to Administration, Chat Widget.

3. 3

   Open the Content tab and find the welcome message.

4. 4

   Also check Triggers: that is often where the message actually sent lives.

5. 5

   Save and reload your site without cache.

Tawk.to documentation: help.tawk.to

What goes wrong most often with Tawk.to

Three mistakes we run into on sites that did set the notice. Each one costs points in the scan, and each one takes minutes to fix.

• Nobody remembers who owns the account

  On Tawk we hit this more often than with any other vendor: the widget runs, but the credentials are lost or sit with a former agency. Sort out access first; without the dashboard you can only place the notice via the banner on your own page.

• The trigger wins over the welcome message

  If you edit the welcome message and nothing changes, you usually have a trigger that fires its own message after a few seconds. That message is what visitors read. Edit the trigger, or switch it off.

• The AI assistant switched on, the text left alone

  Enabling Tawk AI changes what the widget is: a person is no longer the first to answer. The welcome message then commonly stays on the old, human phrasing.

Checking that it works in Tawk.to

Open your site in an incognito window and wait half a minute without clicking. If a message appears that you did not put in the welcome message, a trigger is overriding it; you find that under Triggers in the dashboard. Then click the launcher and read the message inside the window. If you are unsure whether the AI assistant is enabled, ask an open question outside office hours and see whether an answer arrives on its own.

After that you can scan again. Our scan looks at the same public page a visitor does, so what you see in an incognito window is roughly what we see.

Frequently asked questions

Running another widget as well?

• Tidio and Article 50
• Drift and Article 50
• LiveChat and Article 50