NativeChat widget

Progress NativeChat is a cloud product for building and deploying chatbots into various channels. It makes it easy to create chatbots on top of existing systems. Chatbots can interact with users naturally by understanding natural language expressions. Then they can generate reactions and responses based on a cognitive flow definition.

As a Sitefinity CMS user, you can consume existing NativeChat chatbots and display them on your sites.

In this article, you learn how to integrate an existing NativeChat chatbot into your Sitefinity CMS site.

Before you can add a NativeChat bot to your pages, you must connect to your NativeChat account. This enables the content editors to browse and connect to the published bots in the NativeChat account.

Perform the following:

1. Obtain a NativeChat API key for your account.
   Perform the following:
   1. Navigate to NativeChat portal.
   2. In the upper-right corner, click your account avatar.
   3. Click Edit profile.
      The Account screen appears.
   4. Click API tokens » Generate new API token.
   5. Enter a descriptive name for your new token, for example Sitefinity connector API token.
   6. Click Generate token.
      

      IMPORTANT: Do not close this window until you have copied the token because for security reasons it is never shown again by NativeChat.

      RECOMMENDATION: To strengthen the security of your solution, we recommend not storing this token anywhere in text. Instead, enter it directly in your Sitefinity CMS solution, as described below.

2. Login to Sitefinity CMS backend with administrator account.
3. Click Administration » Connector for NativeChat.
   The Connector for NativeChat window appears.
4. Enter the API key for your NativeChat account obtained in Step 1.
5. Click Connect.

RESULT: The NativeChat module is configured, and you can add your existing chatbots to the pages of your Sitefinity CMS site.

The following procedure describes how to add bots to your sites.

You can use the NativeChat widget both on page templates and pages.

To add a NativeChat bot to your Sitefinity CMS page, perform the following:

1. In Sitefinity CMS backend, open for editing the page or the page template where you want to add the chatbot.
2. In right pane, click Content and expand the Chat.
3. Drop the NativeChat widget on the page editor.
4. In the upper-right corner of the widget, click Edit.
   The NativeChat widget screen appears.
5. In Select a chatbot dropdown box, select the bot that you want to use.
   The dropdown box is populated with all bots available in your NativeChat account.
6. If required, configure the chatbot properties.
   For more information, see Publish Your Chatbot on Your Website.

NOTE: To setup FAQ chatbots you need Sitefinity CMS version 14.0.7724 or newer.

With the NativeChat connector and widget  you can also create a FAQ solution, which takes input from Sitefinity and updates it in NativeChat  with the help of the Service hooks module. You can add different variations of the questions and answers and improve the bot  in the NativeChat portal, but you can manage the content in once place - Sitefinity.
You need a published NativeChat chatbot, a dynamic content type with question and answer fields, and a Service hook based on that module.

You can either use your existing FAQ module or create a new dynamic module. For more information, see Create a dynamic content type.

You have two required fields in the content type for the chatbot: Question and Answer. They can have different names, but you need to configure these fields in the service hook for the chatbot. You can have additional fields as well, depending on how you want to present the FAQ on your site.

Next you must create a service hook that updates the NativeChat chatbot when you publish, unpublish, delete, or altogether update dynamic content items for the content type you created. For more information, see Dynamic content items.

1. Navigate to Administration » Service hooks. 
2. Click Create a service hook. 
3. Enter a label for the service hook. This label is used to distinguish this service hook from other service hooks in the list of service hooks you have created. 
4. Select one of the triggers related to the dynamic content type you created for your FAQ. For instance, <dynamic content tpye> is updated or <dynamic content tpye> is published.
5. In Action, select Update chatbot.
6. Select the chatbot to be updated.
7. Fill out the names of the Question and Answer fields.
   This way the service hook is able to tell apart the question and answer fields from other fields you might have in your dynamic content type.
8. Click Save changes.

FAQ chatbots in multilingual sites

You can setup FAQ chatbots in multilingual sites as well. All you need to do is to create a chatbot for each language  in the NativeChat portal, create the service hook with the specific language chatbot, and when the language of the bot and the content match the chatbot is updated.