Activechat Manual
  • What is Activechat?
  • New? Start here
    • The basics
    • Set up your first project
    • Install the chat widget
    • Upload the knowledge
    • Explore the CRM
    • AI-assisted live chat
      • How to set context for AI hints
    • Live chat mobile app
    • Build your first automation
  • Conversational AI
    • For Customer Service Teams
    • For Product Managers
    • For Innovation Teams
    • For Marketers
    • For e-commerce
    • For developers
  • Help Guides
    • Setting up your team
    • Managing conversations
      • Customer attributes
      • User tags and segments
      • Searching for specific users
      • Agent tags (live chat groups and queues)
      • Triggering live chat sessions from the bot
      • Notifications with the TRIGGER block
    • Managing knowledge
      • Uploading business data
      • Question answering and live chat hints
      • Fine-tuning the large language model
    • Natural language automation
    • Building automations visually
      • Customizing your welcome message
      • Adding new skills
      • Navigating skills
      • Copying skills and blocks
      • Handling errors
    • Improving your virtual agent
    • Using live chat AI hints
    • Customizing automatic website page messages
    • Tracking website actions
    • Facebook Ads automation
      • How to set up a Facebook ads bot
      • How to use buttons and quick replies in a Facebook ads chatbot
    • Lead generation
    • Zapier integrations
    • Customizing your project
      • How to customize the chat widget
      • How to customize the Facebook chat widget
      • How to change bot settings
    • Pricing guide
  • Fundamentals
    • Terminology
      • Intents and entities
      • Contexts
      • Skills and events
        • Built-in system skills
          • /start
          • /default
          • /_default_fallback
          • /_start_live_chat
          • /_page_visit
          • /_error
      • Conversation elements
        • Messages
        • Buttons
        • Quick replies
        • Galleries / carousels
    • Messaging channels
      • Website chat widget
        • Installation
        • Customization
        • Voice input
      • Chat widget landing page
      • Facebook Messenger
        • Connect your page
        • 24 hour rule
        • Message tags
        • Persistent menu
      • Telegram
      • Email
      • Twilio SMS automation
    • Intents and bot skills
    • Conversation insights
    • Grow tools
      • Landing pages
      • Messenger links and QR codes
    • Broadcasting
  • Visual builder reference
    • Sending messages
      • TEXT
      • LISTEN
      • IMAGE
      • MEDIA
      • GALLERY
      • FILE
      • EMAIL
      • SMS
      • LEAD
    • Triggering events
      • SEND
      • CATCH
      • TRIGGER
      • LIVE CHAT
    • Manipulating data
      • DATA
      • ADD TAG
      • REMOVE TAG
      • JSON
      • STATUS
      • VALIDATION
    • Conditional logic
      • SWITCH
    • Timers and delays
      • TIMER
      • WAITFOR
      • WAITUNTIL
    • E-commerce blocks
      • CATEGORY
      • PRODUCT
      • VARIATIONS
      • SIMILAR
      • UPSELLS
      • CROSSSELS
      • Shopping carts
        • ADD TO CART
        • UPDATE CART
        • SHOW CART
        • CLEAR CART
        • CREATE ORDER
    • Natural Language
      • NLP
    • System attributes
    • System events
  • Integrations
    • Google services
      • Connect your Google account
      • Google Sheets
        • Searching and updating Google Sheets data
        • Building galleries with Google Sheets data
      • Google Calendar
        • Searching for events
        • Creating and updating events
    • Shopify
    • WooCommerce
    • Dialogflow
      • Building an agent
      • Using entities
      • Slot filling
      • Context management
      • E-commerce NLP
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  • What is an event?
  • Events as commands

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  1. Fundamentals
  2. Terminology

Skills and events

PreviousContextsNextBuilt-in system skills

Last updated 3 years ago

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Conversations that your chatbot is supposed to handle can be quite complex. Even the most simple chatbot should have some key features – like a , the ability to answer specific questions, and maybe a live chat escalation. Then come lead generation, appointment scheduling, e-commerce orders, lead nurturing, and so on.

These conversations can easily become difficult to manage, and this is where skills come in handy. They make it easy to build, handle and update even the most complex conversations without losing focus.

You can think of skills as pages on your website. While it’s easy to build a single-page website for a single task, the majority of websites contain dozens (or even thousands!) of different pages, each serving a specific purpose. The main idea is to split the conversation into smaller parts, each serving a specific user need.

Imagine a restaurant chatbot, for example. Here are some chatbot skills that it can contain:

  • Welcome message and onboarding (explaining what this bot can do)

  • Making reservations

  • Arranging deliveries

  • Getting directions

  • Answering questions etc

Building a single conversation that will address all these possible options is difficult even for a simple bot like this. So, in Activechat you will build a skill for each of these tasks, and then connect these chatbot skills together with events.

A simple example of a skills framework for restaurant chatbot

What is an event?

  • a user interacts with the bot for the first time (start system event)

  • an order is updated in the online shop (order_updated system event)

  • natural language intent is triggered in NLP engine like DialogFlow

  • a user scans a QR code leading into your chatbot

  • …

This mimics the natural conversation flow – when talking, people tend to react to various real-time events and update their conversation accordingly.

Please note that every skill in your bot should start with the CATCH block – it is added automatically when you create a new skill and will be triggered by an event with the same name.

Events as commands

Skills in Activechat are triggered by events, and when you add a new skill to your conversation by clicking the “plus” button in the top right corner of the visual chatbot builder, Activechat will automatically add a that will listen to the event with the same name. You can edit the event name in the CATCH block editor later, although we advise against it.

Skills are triggered by chatbot events, another core concept of our , and almost anything can be an event in Activechat. Here are some examples of events:

a user sends a message to the bot ()

a is clicked by the user

your chatbot logic decides that it’s time to trigger a specific skill with the block

There are two blocks in Activechat to handle events – one is (this one is triggering an event) and another is (this one is listening to specific chatbot events and launches other connected blocks in the flow when this event is triggered). This allows you to send events when you need them – for example, to start one skill in the middle of another.

A simple example of events triggering specific chatbot skills

Any event in Activechat can be triggered right from the conversation by typing the "/" symbol followed by the event name. Most of the time your customers will not be doing this (the mechanics of the events are hidden behind the conversation), but it can be useful in debugging your virtual assistant or when using .

CATCH block
Visual Bot Builder
default system event
deep messenger link
SEND
SEND
CATCH
welcome message and default reply
commands in Telegram