Research alternative chat solutions

[virtser]

Important:

1. Chat bot functionality
2. Notification to email/sms/push

[virtser]

https://talkjs.com

1. We can trigger message sending using their REST API - https://talkjs.com/admin/cKRvMemD/docs/REST_API/Reference/Messages.html
2. Does have Email, SMS, and native mobile push notifications.

[virtser]

@averysteve to help us with research, please define it better by providing more guidelines on what is important.

[averysteve]

What I'm generally interested to learn right now:

• are there really awesome chat plugins we can use that will let us guide the users (landlords and tenants, two flows), like google does with assistant, with buttons, cards and images, that we can predefine and trigger by events or keywords
• this is actually several questions: a) new tech that we should know about? b) ability to inject predefined content? c) ability to create a flow where we suggest steps to user, which they can take action on, in a predefined flow? d) ai or "ai" bot, which can either live in its own channel (like slackbot and lemonade) or join the 'group' conversation between the users (this might be the same as c)
• For notifications, the question is what are the easiest solutions today for doing push, assuming a native environment. Are there certain solutions that include smarter/better built-in push? for example https://medium.com/differential/react-native-push-notifications-with-onesignal-9db6a7d75e1e

The goal of this project, and others like the 'native app options' one, is to take a moment right now to get up to date, see what our capabilities are, think about the right solution (the new flows etc) and then come up with a work plan and prds etc to build the most important parts quickly, and well. We should take the week or so to learn and research about this stuff as much as we (you guys) can. I will also do some research but more important for me to hear from you, what you think the best choices are from all our available options, whether for this or related projects. Make sense?

[amoslande]

Don't see any reason not to use TalkJS, assuming mobile push notification support (which is in beta and might depend on @avnersorek research of the react native)

[virtser]

@amoslande yes, thats the easiest option. If it works well we will definitely use TalkJS. But still, lets research other possible alternative solutions so we will be ready with alternative. Lets think out of box as well like an idea of Steve with Google assistant or maybe Facebook messenger..

[amoslande]

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/identity/customer-matching

[amoslande]

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/NotificationProgrammingGuideForWebsites/PushNotifications/PushNotifications.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40013225-CH3-SW1

@averysteve @avnersorek @virtser Web push notifications seems to be possible in OS-X 10.9+

[amoslande]

https://pushed.co/ Allows notification without writing your own native app... uses some kind of "generic" native app.

[virtser]

SaaS chat solutions:

https://www.cometchat.com - chat, group chat, chatbots, web/mobile, push notifications. https://www.applozic.com - chat, group chat, chatbots, web/mobile, push notifications. https://quickblox.com - chat, video call, chatbots, web/mobile + push notifications. https://rocket.chat - chat, video calls, chatbot can be achieved with https://hubot.github.com/, web/mobile + push.

[virtser]

Chat infrastructures:

https://pusher.com - only realtime chat and push notifications. https://www.twilio.com/chat - only chat and notifications. https://www.pubnub.com/solutions/chat/ - chat, notification, ai and bot. https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/cloud-firebase-chat/#0

[virtser]

@averysteve please review the mentioned solutions here.

[virtser]

More definition provided by @averysteve: - event triggered injection: Triggered by events just means we can decide when to inject something, rather than single purpose (like onboarding).

- predefined flows, so we can offer guided assistance for onboarding, scheduling, etc: Predefined flows just means we can define several funnels or flows which guide the user(s) through a process, like scheduling a viewing, which is one type of content we could inject. Another type of content we can inject are responses to questions, for example “does the contract renew automatically?“, but these can be single responses, not triggering a longer flow.

- group chat functionality (ie multiple humans + bot): The group chat just means, yes, two people (or more) with an ai chatbot in the group.

Re mockups, I am working on it, but I also don’t want to do something out of scope or beyond what we can easily implement, so I think it’s a good idea that you also familiarize yourself with the best options and brief me on capabilities, we can do this simultaneously so that I can get the mocks done this week.

[virtser]

Chatbots

https://chatfuel.com/ https://dev.botframework.com/ https://api.ai/