I am working on a slack bot.
This bot posts ephemerals messages to let the users know it's time to do some actions.
The ephemeral message contains a mention of the user (<#user_id>) so that the user should be notified.
The notification is triggered on computer but not on mobile.
Is this a bug ?
No its not. Ephemeral message delivery is not guaranteed — the user must be currently active in Slack and a member of the specified channel. By nature, ephemeral messages do not persist across reloads, desktop and mobile apps, or sessions.You can find more info here
Related
Is there a way to send proactive cards from a bot to a Teams channel? The use case is a channel for service tickets. Once they get posted, a user will be able to interact with them with a few actions.
I’m looking at the documentation here for sending proactive messages. At the bottom, there’s a section for ”Creating channel conversations”, with a small reference to the startReplyChain(). However, the actual code and sample on GitHub still seem to reference a conversation with a member rather than sending something proactive to a channel.
There does appear to be documentation for incoming and outgoing webhooks, which is what I may end up doing. My only real concern is that it requires using Actionable Cards, which it references as legacy everywhere. This is despite saying that you can’t send Adaptive Cards with them. Perhaps they intend to enable these connectors to send Adaptive Cards, it’s not just very clear to me if this is a long-term solution I should be focusing on.
This is definitely possible, and it's important to note that you can even send from another process/application (e.g. on a schedule from an AWS Lamba). You can see a sample here for this.
The process of sending the message is just part of the story though - you need to have certain information already saved (e.g. in your database) to know how to contact the right user, group chat, or channel conversation, but there are a few ways to get that information. The most common is, when you bot is added to the conversation, to get it from the conversationUpdate event. You'll need conversation id, service url, tenant id, and your bot's App Id (what you get in the Azure portal for your bot, and which you're using already in your app's configuration, teams manifest, etc.). You can read more about the topic here and here.
Another option, if you don't have access to conversationUpdate (e.g. the user hasn't installed your app) is to call the Graph API to install your app. It's only possible to do this to a channel (on the v1 or beta api) (see here) or to a user (see here), but on the beta api only, and not (yet?) for a group chat.
I have tried developing azure bots before. Currently I am trying to find out whether there is any way we could set up a bot that can constantly monitor something and send messages to particular users without user initiating a chat.
For instance, a bot monitors a system and find something wrong and sends a chat message to the user ( Bot initiates the chat in this case ). I did some research but couldn't find any way to achieve this yet.
Thanks in advance,
DM
This concept is called Proactive Messaging in the Bot Framework. There are some example in C# here: https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder-Samples/tree/master/CSharp/core-proactiveMessages and node.js here: https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder-Samples/tree/master/Node/core-proactiveMessages
Something to note is that different channels have different restrictions on when a proactive message can be sent to a user. For instance, on Facebook you have a 24 hour window from the time the user messaged the bot. After 24 hours, if the user has not messaged the bot, then proactive messages will not be allowed through.
More information can be found in this doc: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/bot-framework/dotnet/bot-builder-dotnet-proactive-messages
Edit:
You can also create a Functions Bot in Azure using the Proactive template and it will create a bot that has BasicProactiveEchoDialog.csx that demonstrates how to en-queue a CloudQueueMessage into a CloudStorageAccount. The template will also create an Azure Function that is triggered by additions to the queue. When the function is triggered, it will send the queued message to the user on the channel.
I have a social networking website developed in php which is hosted on the server. Here people can talk to each other through messages.
I want to send and receive the messages, to the other users through google home. It is not like a chat bot. But here, the first user will send message from google home to the website and then the second user will send the message from the website to the first user who will receive it through google home.
Can this be achieved? Do I have to develop some kind of mobile App, so that user has to send the message to the mobile app and then the app sends the data to the server.
or do i have to use the webhook which is available in api.ai?
Any help will be appreciated.
You do not need a mobile app - it sounds like most (but not all) of what you're trying to do would be handled using API.AI's webhook Fulfillment.
However, you're also trying to do asynchronous operations (send a message or a notification to Home without the user prompting for it). This currently isn't possible - you can currently only send a message in response to the user taking some action.
One possible workaround for you is to allow the user to ask "how many messages are waiting for me" or something similar at any point. You can also play multiple messages in reply to a message they might send. However, you have limits (about 5 seconds) on how long you can wait to send a reply to a user instruction.
You can implement a chat bot e.g. via Dialogflow (former api.ai), however you can just react on inputs. You cannot push a message on Google Home (yet). So you could the bot read your mailbox but not implement a chat.
I'm trying to piece together the general workflow of giving a user push notifications via the service worker.
I have followed this Google Developers service worker push notifications tutorial and am currently thinking about how I can implement this sort of thing in a small user based web app for experimentation.
In my mind, the general workflow of an web app supporting push notifications is as follows:
Client visits app
Service worker yields a push notification endpoint
Client sends the endpoint to the server
Server associates the endpoint with the current user that the endpoint was generated for
Every time something that your app would say is notification worthy happens, the server grabs the push notification endpoint(s) associated with the user, and hits it to send a push notification to any user devices (possibly with a data payload in Chrome 50+, etc)
Basically I just want to confirm that my general implementation thoughts with this technology are accurate, else get feedback if I am missing something.
You are pretty much bang on, there are some specifics that aren't quite right (but this is largely phrasing and may be done to personally taste).
Client visits app
Register a Service Worker that you want to use for push messaging
Use the service worker registration to subscribe the user to push messaging, at which point the user agent will configure an endpoint + additional values for encrypting payloads (If the the user agent supports it).
Client sends the endpoint to the server
Server store the the endpoint and data for later use (The server can associate the endpoint with the current user if the server if the web app has user accounts).
When ever the server wishes to send a notification to a user(s), it grabs the appropriate endpoints and calls them that will wake up the service worker which can then display a notification.
Payload support in coming in Chrome 50+ and at the time of writing payload is support in Firefox, but there are 3 different versions of encryption used for the payloads in 3 different versions of Firefox, so I'd wait for the payload support story to be ironed out a little before using it / relying on it.
For a startup considering making public notifications intended for website users available via a Pusher channel, how do you prevent people from subscribing to that channel for a long period of time (camping essentially)? I know you can disconnect users after a period of inactivity if they are connected from a web client (by checking for activity on the client and sending a disconnect after a period of inactivity), but what if users decide to connect via a command-line app or something similar?
Pusher provides private channels where the subscription to those channels need to be signed using your application secret in order for the subscription to be allowed.
Given the command-line app example you've provided the author of that application would not know the application secret and would therefore not be able to subscribe to the private channel.