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Typing indicators

Indicate to your user that your bot is "thinking"

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The Meya bot engine will automatically emit typing indicator events to supported chat apps. These are useful to indicate to your user that your bot is "thinking" (ie. processing). The user will know not to type during this time, and that a bot response is on its way.

Integrations that support typing indicators

Typing indicators are currently supported for:

  1. Facebook Messenger
  2. Meya Test Chat
  3. Meya Web Chat
  4. Telegram
  5. Webhook/API
  6. Smooch
  7. Kik
  8. Twitter
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Typing indicators can be turned off or on from the integration page.

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You can see typing indicator status in Meya test chat

🚧

Typing indicators off by default for older bots

By default, Messenger bot integrations created before Nov. 11, 2016 will have typing indicator "off" by default. You can turn on in the integrations page.

How it works

Meya flows are a state machine, and states have two important life cycle events:

  1. state start: prior to any component processing
  2. state end: after component processing, but just prior to message delivery to end-user (if applicable)
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Typing state life cycle

You can specify the default typing behavior at the state level of the Flow YAML using the typing property

states:
  state_name:
    component: component_name
    # default: on or no_change
    typing: on|off|no_change|keep_on
typing_modestate_startstate_endnotes
on✅
turn on		❌
turn off		This is the default component behavior for built-in components that emit messages and custom components
ex. meya.text
off❌
turn off		➡
do nothing		Useful for manually turning off typing.
no_change➡
do nothing		➡
do nothing		Default behavior for built-in components that don't emit messages. Useful for "silent" components that compute/retrieve data
ex meya.set
keep_on✅
Turn on		➡
do nothing		Leaves typing on until a state turns it off or messaging app turns off via timeout.
states:
    text:
        component: meya.text
        properties:
            text: "Typing on ⏲"
    first:
        component: process
        typing: "keep_on"
    second:
        component: process
        typing: "no_change"
    third:
        component: meya.pass
    last:
        component: meya.text
        properties:
            text: "Done! 💯"

Twitter

Twitter only accepts the typing: on typing mode. The indicator will automatically turn off within 3 seconds.

Updated over 6 years ago