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.

NOTE: Because of the integration between Sitefinity CMS and NativeChat, you do not need to copy and paste any raw HTML code. Instead, you use the NativeChat widget.

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:

Obtain a NativeChat API key for your account.

Perform the following:

1. Navigate to the NativeChat portal.
2. In the upper-right corner, click Administration.
   The Administration screen appears.
3. Click API tokens » Generate new API token.
4. Enter a descriptive name for your new token.
   For example Sitefinity connector API token.
5. Click Generate token.

IMPORTANT: Before closing this window, copy the token. For security, it is displayed only once.

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

Perform the following:

1. Generate the NativeChat API key as described in the procedure above.
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.
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.

PREREQUISITES: You must have connected Sitefinity CMS and NativeChat, as described above.

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. Configure the chatbot widget properties.
   

   RECOMMENDATION: To help proactively engage your site visitors, you can set the chatbot to automatically pop up when the site visitors visit a page. This functionality is useful on personalized pages because you can be more assured that the selected conversation matches the target persona of the personalized page.

   To do this, set the option Start conversation automatically to Yes. Then, in the Conversation to start with, select the starting conversation, from ones defined in the NativeChat portal.
   For more information, see Publish Your Chatbot on Your Website.

   You can set up the chat bot widget to be displayed as a dialog which pops over your page content, or inside an HTML element - usually, a div element in a Content block. To do this, you set up the options under Chat window.

   NOTE: If you set the chat window to be displayed inline, you must place the content block which will contain the chat window before the Chat widget. Otherwise, the chat window won’t be displayed.

With the NativeChat connector and widget you can also create a FAQ solution, which takes input from Sitefinity CMS and updates it in NativeChat with the help of service hooks. You can add different variations of the questions and the answers and improve the bot in the NativeChat portal, but you can manage the content only in Sitefinity CMS.
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.

You must create a service hook that updates the NativeChat chatbot when you publish, unpublish, delete, or update dynamic content items for the content type you have 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.
4. Select one of the triggers related to the dynamic content type you created for your FAQ.
   For example, <dynamic content type> is updated or <dynamic content type> 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 also set up FAQ chatbots in multilingual sites. 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.