Connecting 3rd party bots to messenger

Question

Is it possible to connect 3rd party bots (our bots) to the messenger? With the possibility of "handing-off" the conversation to an Intercom agent at some point (and returning to the bot, after the agent finished)? Our company makes custom bots for customers. We offer our widget, but we have no customer service functionality.  It would be nice if the visitor can start conversing with our bot, preferably watched by an agent, and one point the chat would continue between the agent and the visitor. This could be initiated by either the bot or the agent (or maybe the visitor).

Racheal · Accepted Answer

Hey @open​Racheal from the support engineer team here&#128075;It would not be possible to connect a third party Bot to the Messenger in this way. You may be able to use our REST API and/or our webhooks to write a script or app to do this, however, it would require some dev resources on your end. Before getting started I would suggest reviewing our developer documentation to see the available endpoints as you explore what’s possible. Without being too familiar with your product I'm thinking your team would need to listen for the event or the action the user takes to switch to the Messenger whether thats a button or something updated in your product, then you would need to use the create a conversation endpoint to open up a conversation for the user. Another option that may be helpful here are Custom Actions, this may not be exactly what you're looking for but Custom Actions in Bots are great for fetching data from outside databases!

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