Introduction to External Chatbots
Pingstreams “External Chatbot” engine
Section titled “Pingstreams “External Chatbot” engine”Pingstreams allows you to embed your own chatbot backend with the External Chatbots engine. An “External chatbot” is a simple web application that communicates with Pingstreams through callbacks. With an External chatbot you can embed your own chatbot technology with many benefits (i.e. “asynchronous messaging”).
External chatbots offer many advantages. You can for example:
- Easily integrate your own chatbot technology using Pingstreams’s widget on websites and mobile apps
- Use Pingstreams multichannel features (coming soon) to propose your custom chatbot on Facebook, Telegram, Whatsapp etc.
- Easily handoff a conversation from your chatbot to human agents managed by Pingstreams
- Monitor all of your chatbot conversations using Pingstreams Conversations Real Time panel
Async conversation and callbacks
Section titled “Async conversation and callbacks”Beyond the main advantages described before, External Chatbots provide other important features. For example, communication between Pingstreams and your external chatbot is fully asynchronous. This means that you can provide, through your chatbot, information that wasn’t available when the user started his conversation. You can for example provide Financial info on stock exchange as soon as your backend detects something that the users can appreciate. You can also provide weather info, events coming from your Smart Home or security systems and the user can continue the conversation from the moment that this data is provided and communicated. So, to summarize, your chatbot can:
- Get text and actions from end users (then…)
- Communicate asynchronously with your chatbot’s users
Finally don’t forget that Pingstreams APIs are always available from your chatbot backend, providing you APIs to:
- Move conversations to Agents
- Invite specific agents to the current conversation
- Switch to specific departments
- Set additional metadata to the current conversation etc.
- Fire events using event APIs
- Much more 😎
This guide summary
Section titled “This guide summary”- Hello World tutorial - get started with embedding your own External chatbot with Pingstreams.
- Chatbot to Human handoff - Learn how to handoff the conversation to a human operator
- Send Text Buttons - Learn how to send Buttons as a reply option to the user
- Advanced Tutorials - A step by step guide to connect a Dialogflow agent to Pingstreams
Enjoy Pingstreams and don’t forget to send us feedback to support@pingstreams.io!