Structure of a Response

Each of the above response (Bot Responses, Entity Response, Final Response, and Follow Up Response) are composed of the following:

• Variants
• Message
• Quick replies

Variants

A bot response can consist of multiple variants where each variant is an independent message. All variants should imply the same meaning as the bot chooses a variant randomly to avoid being repetitive even when asked the same question.

Each variant is composed of Messages and Quick Replies.

When showing variants, we now also show the platforms enabled for that particular variant. Clicking on it opens a small tooltip that allows you to add/remove platforms or just select the platforms for your variant here. If you select a platform like WhatsApp, this variant will be sent to users when they are accessing the bot on WhatsApp.

Adding device-specific variants to our chat elements helps build one flow for one or many platforms. Depending on the platform the user is using to chat, the device-specific variants would be served to the end-user. This would give power to the bot builder to modify existing bots and add incremental support for a platform without much effort.

The limitation here is that the flow must be the same across platforms.

Message

A variant can have multiple message bubbles. Each message is a separate text from the bot. Instead of putting a long message into just one message bubble, you can split it into multiple shorter messages. However, you should avoid adding more than 3-4 messages in a single variant.

Quick Replies

In addition to providing the bot response, you might also want to include prompts for how to reply back to the bot again. These pre-defined prompts are called Quick Replies.