Optimizing Content for WhatsApp
When creating content for WhatsApp it's important to be mindful of the capabilities of WhatsApp to ensure a smooth end-user experience.
If you’re going to integrate with WhatsApp, it’s good to know a few things about how it will display the answers you have in Conversational AI Cloud. For the best results, we would recommend adding a contextual answer for WhatsApp to your existing answers that follow some general guidelines and take note of the following limitations:
When creating content, please keep the following in mind:
Answer Length: Character limit of 4096 characters per chat bubble
Chat Bubbles: Placing a line break (single enter) will cause the answer to be split into separate chat bubbles
Markdown: WhatsApp has very limited markdown support when it comes to formatting your answers. Only bold and italics text are supported. Underlined text is not supported and will show Html in the Answer if used. Lists are not supported in WhatsApp. A word can't have multiple markdown styling formats, e.g. you can not have a word be both bold, and italic.
Images: The title of an image (as configured in the CMS) will be shown in the same bubble as the image as the text Only images of the MIME type image/jpg are supported for our WhatsApp integration. We recommend only using one image per answer. When using multiple images in an answer, they will get split into multiple chat bubbles and will not be sent to the receiver in sequential order. WhatsApp does not guarantee sequential delivery when using multiple images and this cannot be changed.
Videos: Get sent as a plain URL. The first URL in the message with a video gets shown as the preview. WhatsApp currently only has media support for images. A preview for videos will not be shown
Media can not exceed 64MB
Only text, WhatsApp List Messages, or WhatsApp Quick Replies are supported from end-users
URLs: When using multiple URLs in your answer, a preview will only be generated for the first URL. Also, the entire URL will be shown instead of the selected linked text on the sent WhatsApp message. For example, if you’ve selected the text ‘click here’ to add your URL to, the ‘click here’ would be replaced by the URL in the WhatsApp Message.
Dialogs & T-Dialogs: You can use dialogs with WhatsApp. Dialog options will be prefixed with a number (1. 2. 3., etc). When the user provides that number as an input "1." or "2." the corresponding dialog option will be selected by the system. This works both with and without the "." character, so "1" is valid as input as well.
Answer Additions: This feature is also supported and can be used, for example, when an answer that is either a QA or the end of a dialog contains an addition "showFeedback" and the value is "true", a "feedback" Event can be triggered and shown as the next interaction for the user to respond to in the WhatsApp conversation.
Neither CM.com nor WhatsApp guarantee sequential ordering of messages meaning that it’s possible that these get delivered in the wrong order. Media in used in your answer almost always shows up as the last message in text bubbles.
The CM.com API doesn’t always deliver messages instantly. Sometimes it can take moment for a message to get delivered.
Learn more on the CM.com Whatsapp Business Solution page.
