public
POST /v1/public/chat/{publicKey}/conversations
A visitor says something for the first time.
Authentication
This endpoint is public. It takes no credential and no organisation — it is what our own marketing site and AI answer engines read.
This endpoint takes no organisation id. Your key already identifies the organisation it belongs to, and the response is scoped to it.
Try it
Replace anything in angle brackets with your own values, and the key placeholder with a key from your dashboard.
curl -X POST https://api.zinndigital.com/v1/public/chat/{publicKey}/conversations \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{ "message": <string> }'Signed in? The API console in your dashboard fills in your real organisation id and your own key, and runs the request against the live API so you can see the actual response. Open this endpoint in the API console
Details
Anonymous. Opens a conversation and writes the visitor's first message, then lets the assistant answer it inline if the customer has AI switched on. The response carries a visitorToken once and never again. It is a bearer secret — the only thing standing between one visitor and another's transcript on the same site — so the widget keeps it in the visitor's own storage and presents it in X-Zinn-Chat-Token on every subsequent call. It is never accepted in a query string, because a query string is written to every access log.
Parameters
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
publicKey (path) | string | Yes | The widget's public key. Public by design — it ships in the page source of every site that embeds the widget — so it NAMES a widget and authorises nothing; the Origin header is… |
Request body
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
message | string | Yes | — |
page_url | string | No | — |
page_title | string | No | — |
referrer | string | No | — |
locale | string | No | — |
name | string | No | — |
email | string | No | — |
Response
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
state | string<ai, waiting, open, offline, closed> | Yes | — |
cursor | integer | Yes | — |
poll_after_ms | integer | Yes | How long the widget should wait before asking again. Decided by the SERVER on every response, because a cadence baked into the widget is cached on somebody else's site behind… |
messages | ChatMessage[] | Yes | — |
conversation_id | string | Yes | — |
visitor_token | string | Yes | Returned ONCE and never again. A bearer secret — the only thing between one visitor and another's transcript on the same site — presented afterwards in X-Zinn-Chat-Token, never… |
Errors this endpoint can return
404 · 422 · 429