Question
I see that I have Answer Bot when I start a chat using the Chat SDK, but I don't have a subscription for Answer Bot. How is that possible?
Answer
In the Chat SDK V2, the Answer Bot feature visible in the Chat is a simple chat bot to make the interaction more human. It is there to replace the pre-chat form. You will not be billed for using this feature.
This feature is different from the Answer Bot that suggests articles, even though they share a name by default. You can change the name of this bot. For more information on this, see the Android's documentation and the IOS documentation.
If you want to use the Answer Bot feature from Zendesk Guide, check the documentation about the Unified SDK, which can use the Answer Bot engine to suggests articles: Unified SDK Android and Unified SDK iOS.
If you do not want to ask questions to your users, disable the pre-chat form (Chat SDK v2 for Android and Chat SDK v2 for iOS) and set the .withPreChatFormEnabled
option to false in the builder of the Messaging Activity (what starts the Chat).
A caveat to this behavior is when your account is offline and the .withAgentAvailabilityEnabled
is set to true.
- If it is, the SDK checks if your account is available, and if it has at least one agent online. If those conditions are not fulfilled, the bot will then advise you that the account is offline.
- If
.withOfflineFormsEnabled
is true (default) you will be able to leave an offline message. If it isn't the bot will inform you that the account is offline and will tell you to try later on.
10 Comments
Setting chatConfiguration.isPreChatFormEnabled = false still pulls up Chat with an agent and answer bot message on iOS Chat SDK v2, how do I stop it? Thanks
Hi, thank you for your feedback!
When you set isPreChatFormEnabled to False in the configuration, did you pass it to UI builder afterward like so? (iOS example here - documentation)
The same applies for Android. Could you tell me if that works for you?
Hi Arnaud, thanks for replying.
Please find the attached code. This is how I pass the chatConfiguration to the UIbuilder . I keep getting Chat with an agent and answer bot message after signing back to the app (Both after ending the chat and signing out without ending the chat ). I also tried the same code that you have posted but I get the same behaviour.
Hi Gokul,
Thank you for your reply and all this information! As it may require more investigation, I created a ticket so we could communicate more directly.
I'm facing the same issue. Seems like a bug in the SDK.
The first chat session works fine but after endChat() everything is messed up. Showing the chat UI again will trigger the bot and immediately start a chat session.
Any news on the bug fix?
Hi Ronny,
Thank you for your feedback, I have converted your comment into a ticket so I could have a better look at this.
I'm facing the same issue as well. Is there any estimates when this bug will be fixed?
Hi Martynas,
Thank you for your feedback. On previous cases we saw that some old zchat pods could create this issue and some other specific settings can make the first chat work as expected but have the bot interact in subsequent ones.
Could you describe the behaviour you are seeing and on which platform/version of SDK you are running your app? I can turn that into a ticket with those information.
I'm using 2.9.0 iOS chat SDK v2 and I've installed it with carthage. I'm having exact behavior where first message is sent without bot, and after you close the chat ViewController, every other
Messaging.instance.buildUI
instance posts answer bot as in screenshots provided in this threadThis is my ChatConfiguration setup:
Martynas Pašilis
I was able to avoid the answer bot in my project with a little workaround:
the bug happens when the viewController returned from Messaging.instance.buildUI() is retained (by having a weak reference). I fixed it by listening to the .viewDidDisappear event and nil that reference.
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