Why do I see the Answer Bot in the Chat SDK even though I don't have a subscription?

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 autoreplies. How is that possible?

Answer

In the Chat SDK V2, the Answer Bot visible in the conversation is a chatbot to make the interaction more human. It's there to replace the pre-chat form. Zendesk won't bill your account for using this feature.

This feature is different from the autoreplies that suggest articles. To change the name of this bot, see the Android documentation and the IOS documentation.

If you want to use the autoreplies feature, check the documentation about the Unified SDK, which can use the autoreplies engine to suggest articles: Unified SDK Android and Unified SDK iOS.

If you don't 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 (this starts the Chat).

When your account is offline and the .withAgentAvailabilityEnabled is set to true there are a few things to consider:

• If it is set to true, 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.

Attention: Zendesk has renamed our bot capabilities. "Answer Bot" is now "Zendesk bots", "Flow Builder" is "bot builder", and "Article Recommendations" are "autoreplies". For more information on this change, see this announcement.