Mobile App - Native
While we don't offer native mobile SDKs yet, you simply plug your chatbot to your existing mobile app.
Here is a quick tutorial to do so.
Decide where to host the chat widget
As Smartly.AI webchat is fully responsive, we can use it in a mobile app and have a good user experience.
First you will have to decide whether we want the webchat to be hosted in the bot platform or within your own website / domain
Below are some pros and cons to each solution.
| Widget hosting | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Option 1 Smartly.AI demo page | The simplest solution as the page is already hosted | Less customizable |
| Option 2 Dedicated page in our website | More control, more security and more flexibility. | -- |
Our recommandation is to use a dedicated page rater than the demo page for your mobile app needs.
Why? Principally because you will be able to safely send some user data from the mobile app to the bot . This data can be the user first name or a even an authentication token that can be used to personalize the user experience.
For Option 1, you can find the demo page link of your webchat as shown below 👇
For Option 2 you can find the widget code as shown below 👇
Set your widget to be opened
As we will have a natve button to deal with the state of the widget, we will set the widget to open by default
Now each team someone arrives on your page, the chat will automatically be opened and start.
Add a chat button to your interface
The goal of this button will be to show the chat widget.
As you will see below, the chat should then be opened in a webview.
It is important to show/hide the same webview so that the conversation context can be kept.
Clicking the button will show a full screen webview
Implement the webview that will display the chat
Once clicked, we want the button to show a Webview linked to the url of the page hosting the widget.
Here is some useful links:
Send some user data to your bot
If you have opted for Option 2, here is the steps to safely send some user data to the bot from the mobile app:
- While opening the chat in the webview, you send some data to your page via
POST - Collect this data from the page and populate the
user_dataobject with the desired data - The chatbot can the use this data to greet the user by its name, make API calls to get dynamic calls and so on.
Send at least the user name
This will allow you to get in touch with some users later, or just greet them by their name 🙂
Updated about 1 year ago