# How Aura works

> The parts of Aura and how they fit: workspaces, bots, the chat on your site, conversations, visits, people, tickets and insights.

## The parts

| Part | What it is |
|---|---|
| Workspace | Your bots, chats, visitors and figures. You have your own, and each OneInfer organisation you're in has one its members share. |
| Bot | One chatbot, usually one per website: its persona, knowledge, model, handoff rules, look and snippet. |
| The chat | The chat button and panel on your site, loaded by the bot's snippet. |
| Visit | One person's time on your site, from their first page until 30 minutes after their last tab closes. Kept 30 days. |
| Chat (conversation) | A conversation between a visitor and the bot, your team or both. Kept 12 months after its last message. |
| Person | Someone who has chatted. Their later chats and visits join up under them. Kept 12 months after their last chat. |
| Ticket | A chat that reached your team, with a status, an assignee, a priority and tags. See [Tickets](https://aura.oneinfer.ai/docs/tickets). |
| Insights | The figures: visitors, chats, what the AI resolved, how pages are used, conversions. |

## From a visitor to an answer

1. **A visitor opens a page.** The chat loads and the visit appears on [Live](https://aura.oneinfer.ai/docs/live) with the page, where they came from and their device. Nothing is stored in their browser at this point.
2. **They ask a question.** The bot looks through your [knowledge](https://aura.oneinfer.ai/docs/bots/knowledge) for the passages that fit, favouring the page they're on, and its model writes an answer. The chat is kept in [Chats](https://aura.oneinfer.ai/docs/chats).
3. **The bot can't answer, or they want a person.** The bot says so in your words and offers your team. If they say yes, use one of your keywords, or the bot has no answer, the chat goes to your team and they're [alerted](https://aura.oneinfer.ai/docs/notifications).
4. **Someone from your team replies.** Replying takes the chat over from the bot. The visitor sees your team's name, never yours. The chat became a [ticket](https://aura.oneinfer.ai/docs/tickets) when it reached your team, and it's now assigned to whoever took it.
5. **Nobody is online.** Outside your opening hours, or when nobody on the team has used Aura in the last 10 minutes, the bot asks for the visitor's email. Your replies reach them there.
6. **The chat ends.** It closes after a quiet spell (30 minutes by default) or when your team closes it. The visitor can rate it, and the bot can note how it went.

## How visits are counted

Aura groups a visitor's page loads into a visit without cookies. It uses a one-way code made from the bot, the visitor's IP address and their browser, with a key that changes every day. The address and the browser string themselves are never stored.

So, by default:

- A visit is one person on one day. Someone who comes back tomorrow is a new visit, unless they chatted, your site tells Aura who they are, or you turn on **Recognise returning visitors**. See [Visits and journeys](https://aura.oneinfer.ai/docs/visits).
- Crawlers, and visits that never show a sign of a person (such as email security tools opening links), are left out of Insights.

## What it costs

A bot costs $1 a month while it's on. You pay 2¢ for each conversation the AI answers, plus the AI's own cost, passed on with no markup. Your team's replies and teammates are free. See [Pricing and billing](https://aura.oneinfer.ai/docs/billing).