Rich responses

Botfront allows you to create visually all sort of rich responses for your Rasa assistant such as buttons, quick replies, images and carousels.

Text responses

Text response are supported by all channels. You can split text responses into separate messages by typing enter.

Markdown

Some channels allow you to style responses with Markdown. Here are common styling examples.

Features support by channel

Buttons and quick replies

The main difference between buttons and quick replies is that quick replies disappear from the conversation once a user has clicked on it while buttons persist.

Quick replies are used when the underlying payload (intents and entities) is contextual, for example with yes or no responses. Yes and No are generally direct answers to the previous bot utterance. Therefore there is no reason to keep the options available in the conversation once the user has responded.

Buttons, however will persist on the screen after the user has selected an answer. Buttons are used when the proposed options remain available later in the conversation.

Simply toggle the pin button to make your response a quick reply or a button.

Attaching actions to buttons

You can attach two types of actions:

• Payload: simply select the intent and optionnally the entities you want to map to a click on this button or quick reply.
• hyperlink: insert the link to the page you want to link.

Features support by channel

images

To add an image, simply select the image message type. If you’re using Botfront locally, you must add the link to your image. If you want to use the upload functionality, you must implement the upload and delete deployment webhooks.

Features support by channel

carousels

To create a carousel, select the carousel response type from the options, the start adding your cards. A carousel is made of cards, and each card contains a title, and description, an image, and up to 3 buttons.

You can also define a default action that will be performed if the user click anywhere on the cards (except the buttons).

Features support by channel

Variations

Variations are alternative responses your assistant can provide. Variations should convey the same meaning and be used to make your assistant less robotic. Click the the ellipsis button and add your variations as follows.

Variations are supported for all channels and response types.

Advanced response configuration

The Rasa Webchat widget gives you some flexibility to further configure your responses. Click on the ellipsis menu and select the Behaviour tab.

• Decide where links should open. This will only apply to the current response: links are opened in a new tab (target="_blank") by default for all responses.
• Enable, disable or hide the user input field (e.g. to force the use of buttons). This will only apply to the current response: the input is always enabled by default for all responses.
• Force the widget to open or close. If you force close the chat widget, the response will appear as a tooltip attached to the chat launcher. You will need to force open again if you want to re-open the chat widget.

Note that these settings are attached to the response

When using the Rasa Webchat you can add further configuration to your responses.

Renaming responses

When you create a response, Botfront generates a random response name. If you need more human readable names you can rename them as follows

Emojis 🎉🤔

Since Emojis are characters, they are generally supported by all channels and bot responses.

• All users: simply copy (e.g. from Emojipedia) and paste an emoji in your response.
• Mac users: Ctrl+Cmd+[Space] will open an emoji menu you can pick from.
• Windows users: Win + . or Win + ; will open an emoji menu you can pick from.