I understand build is currently underway on improved FB integration with TARS bots. Are you able to help me and my wishlist with any progress?
I’ve got to the point where I had my RepairBOT deployed successfully on my Facebook page but I removed it due to a few issues I identified:
The bot would only start conversations after an initial prompt - unlike the bot on my website where it activates after a few seconds.
the bot would start conversations on historical chat users, such as those who I was talking with before I deployed the bot to FB - I could not turn this off.
I had no way of toggling the bot ON/OFF
the bot had gambits designed for website, such as “what’s your name?” etc. I would have needed to create two bots. one for FB and one for website deployment.
Some gambits displayed message bubble text twice or in the wrong order.
I’m hoping the awesome TARS team can come up with some resolutions to this and improve Human-Bot handover when it comes to Facebook Messenger. I’d like to suggest the following:
The ability to toggle the bot on and off for certain chats, providing the page admin to toggle on after he/she has initiated a conversation or answered a human-human question. We often get “hi, do you fix phones?” so if we can say “yes, sure… have a quick chat with our resident data-capture bot” that would be handy!
and/or the ability to initiate the bot to chat to NEW users who click the message icon on our page OR trigger the bot automatically if certain criteria is met, such as keywords, etc.
The ability to pull data from Facebook user profiles to remove the necessity for gambits that capture information such as full name.
I’ve got limited FB deployment experience but I often find we need a separate option for users, or a gambit that can ‘route’ the user to a Human person and end the conversation, similar to how Drift has a bot that can route certain requests to different users.
If there’s anything in the pipeline for FB deployment integration/improvements, I’d love to hear about it and be involved! Having a bot on FB really helps capture and provide our customers with some very repetitive answers.
Hey Will - thanks for pointing these out and for the suggestions around how we can make messenger integration better. Trying to answer them below -
The bot would only start conversations after an initial prompt - unlike the bot on my website where it activates after a few seconds. - FB doesn’t allow the conversations to start off unless a user has opted in the conversation. We do that on web based bots but it is out of our scope to do the same with messenger bots. Having a “Get Started” prompt will make the experience better though.
the bot would start conversations on historical chat users, such as those who I was talking with before - this is because the bot kicks off when the historical users initiate the chat. This will be solved with a better human-bot switchover.
I deployed the bot to FB. I had no way of toggling the bot ON/OFF. - this is a good suggestion and we can add this capability in the builder.
the bot had gambits designed for website, such as “what’s your name?” etc. I would have needed to create two bots. one for FB and one for website deployment. - Yes it might be a good idea to make a clone of the existing bot, make some changes to it and then deploy the new bot in messenger. We are trying to make it as seamless as possible to have the same bot run on both web and messenger but there are definitely some edge cases.
Some gambits displayed message bubble text twice or in the wrong order. - this is odd, shouldn’t be happening. Can you send some screenshot over our support chat and we can see why this is happening.
Other than this using user’s FB profile data is something that’s already a part of the roadmap and the human-bot switchover would ideally solve the other issues you have mentioned as well.
We are working on making the messenger integration better and you should see updates around it soon
In addition to this, I’ve noticed a feature of Facebook Messenger 2.0, called the Handover Protocol:
The apps that are currently subscribing to your page and their information will be listed here. Note that setting up the Primary Receiver and Secondary Receiver roles will trigger Handover Protocol. Please make sure the apps can support the protocol before setting up the roles.
