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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  1. Visual builder reference
  2. Sending messages

LISTEN

PreviousTEXTNextIMAGE

Last updated 3 years ago

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Use this block to get user input into the bot. When this block is executed, it starts “listening” to user input and saves it to the specified user variable (attribute). By default, $_last_user_input variable is used.

To avoid situations when the user clicks “Send” (or “Enter”) before he/she completes the reply, there’s an option of “polite delay”. When you set this option to anything but zero, the bot keeps “listening” to the user during a specified time in seconds. If the user starts typing again during this delay, his/her next input will be appended to the input variable. Otherwise, the bot will trigger the next block in the flow.

LISTEN block editor

Quick replies

“Quick replies”, or “chips” as Google calls it, are pre-defined answers that users can click to reply to the bot message. These replies can be connected with lines to other blocks, and if the user clicks one of the connected replies (or types exactly the same text), control will be given to the connected block. Otherwise, control will go to the default exit at the bottom of the LISTEN block.

In the example above there are three quick replies – “Morning”, “Afternoon” and “Evening”, each triggering TEXT block with specific text. If the user is typing anything else (for example, “12 pm”), the TEXT block below will be triggered, sending “OK, your choice is 12 pm” back to the user.

You can use variables as quick replies. This will render the actual variable value at run time as a quick reply.

IMPORTANT: LISTEN block should immediately follow TEXT or IMAGE blocks since quick replies have to be preceded by text or images. If you try to connect the LISTEN block to any other block (like SWITCH or DATA), Activechat will not allow you to do so.

IMPORTANT: if you do not have any LISTEN block active during a conversation with your user (this can happen if all your skills have finished and the bot is just sitting there, not expecting any specific input from the user), the “default” system event will be triggered every time user is sending a message to the bot. It will start the “default” system skill that is listening to that event, and you'll be able to send it to the natural language processing engine through the NLP block or analyze for specific keywords if you prefer this approach.

For more info on quick replies and their usage, .

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