About the bot builder

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.

You can use the bot builder to create answers for your conversation bots, giving your customers the opportunity to self-serve their support issues before connecting with agents. In this article, we’ll introduce you to the bot builder UI and basic functionality. For information about working with the bot builder, see Building a conversation bot using answers.

This article includes the following topics:

• The bot builder UI
• Publishing bot updates

The bot builder UI

The bot builder is the tool you use to create answers for your bot, which controls how it behaves in response to customer input.

The bot builder components are listed below. Each plays an important role in building your answer:

• Header, which appears at the top of the screen, above the flow. On the header, you'll find breadcrumbs for the answer's bot as well as the Preview and Done buttons. For more information, see Publishing bot updates.
• Flow, your answer represented in a decision tree format, as a series of connected steps representing the interaction the bot can have with a customer. You can select a step to configure the bot's responses, and add steps to the answer. The navigation controls at the bottom of the flow allow you to zoom in and out of the answer, or pan to areas in the answer, and you can pinch to zoom using a touchpad or touch screen.
• Configuration panel, where you can customize each step in your answer. The appearance of this panel changes based on what type of bot step you're working on.
  • Answer builder (shown above), displayed when you initially create an answer, and when you select the top step in the answer. Here, you can configure your answer intent, and work with your question variations.
  • Configuration tab, which appears when you select a step to the answer, or add a new step to an answer. Here, you can select the type of step you want to add to your answer, add and edit automated messages, and build lists of options for your customers to choose from. For detailed information on these step types, including usage and configuration rules, visual examples of the steps in the bot builder, and how each appears to your customers in a Web Widget, see Understanding bot step types.
  • Preview tab, for previewing the customer experience created by the answer, before releasing it to your customers. Click the Preview tab in the Configuration panel to view.

Publishing bot updates

Any changes made in the bot builder must be published before they appear in your messaging channel.

To publish a bot update

1. Create or update your answers in the bot builder, and click Save.
2. In the header, click Publish. This makes the changes live in your messaging channels, and updates the publishing information in the header.

For more information about publishing, see Publishing answers.