Conversational Apps

Published by Andrea on 10 April 2022

Advantages of the Conversational Apps

In Tiledesk “Conversation-embedded” applications (aka Conversational Apps) are simple web applications proposed to the user directly inside the conversational flow. They improve the general interactive and functional power of a conversation. The user can, for example, play an entire video game in the conversation flow, without ever leaving the conversation in the chat. But their use is more pratical indeed, like for example completing a complex input form, that through a chatbot is difficult to fill. There are many use cases where an app running in the conversation increases the user perceived interactive power.

All of these benefits come with another hidden one: data isolation from the conversation’s host platform (aka Tiledesk).

Data isolation

Conversation-embedded apps totally isolate the exchanged data flow from the conversation. Data isolation is less obvious then UI enhancement, but it’s probably a more important concept.

When exchanging messages with support some of your messages can contain sensitive information, for example a credit card to complete a payment oparation. The user doesn’t appreciate so much sending this info to human agents to complete the operation on their behalf. They mainly prefere to complete the operation by their own, possibly without leaving the conversation context. This is where conversation apps come in handy.

In Tiledesk, the conversation-embedded app is an entire web application running on his own web server, served on the HTTPS protocol. This means that data exchanged with the app is totally unkonwn by Tiledesk and is exchanged only between the app and his own backend. This pertains to privacy and security. Go back to our user paying for a cart. The chatbot can provide the user with a payment-app where the end-user is asked about his credit card info. These data are directly exchanged with the payment backend, never with Tiledesk. No info about the transaction is stored into the conversation or exchanged with support agents. Only the actors interested in the interaction are involved (the end-user and the payment backend, i.e. Stripe).

Conversational Apps Anatomy

Tiledesk’s Web Widget provides the opportunity to create and propose Apps directly in the conversation flow. The application is delivered through a simple message. In Tiledesk all messages are typed, meaning that we have many message types (text, images, videos, maps etc.) among which we find the frame type. The frame type (discussed here) is just a link whose content is rendered inside an iframe, in place of the message.

frame of chatbot — A **Conversational App** is just a frame containing the web application

One of the most valuable things an app can do is communicate with Tiledesk APIs. This is very handy if you want, for example, use orchestration APIs or send a message back in the conversation where the app is hosted into.

You can discover more info in the developer zone, where some tutorials are available to show you step by step examples to build a couple of interesting demos.