With all this hype about facebook launched group bots with their Messenger, I also wanted to try it out. I already have a bot which you can chat with tete-a-tete, and I just wanted to allow this bot to be used in the chat group I created. I thought that it would be very easy just like with telegram bots: add a bot into a group like a normal person. It seems that I was mistaken. The bot is a page (app), not a person, so I cannot find it when I press 'add people to conversation' button. I could bot find any other way to use the bot into a group. Do I miss something? Do I understand the concept of facebook bots wrongly? Maybe someone can share their experience in creating a group bot for Messenger.
2 Answers
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You can make a bot that behaves like a group
The most common scenario is where all users send the messages to the bot, and it identifies each with a UserId, to know who to respond to what.
A bot typically uses the userId to determine who to send each message to. With that only the recipient will receive it.
By removing this conditional that restricts the message to the recipient only, all users have received the sent messages.
With this just add an information about who is sending the message
msg = username + "says:" + message
a friend did this on Parlo
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For regular Facebook messenger, you can add chat extensions to group chats but not bots. Chat extensions have much more limited capabilities.
It doesn't seem likely that the capabilities you'd want in a chatbot will be available to chat extensions anytime soon. Below is a quote from Facebook's Messenger engineering manager Mikhail Larionov at the 2017 F8 developer conference:
"Chat extensions do not listen to your messages. You cannot @ mention them. Instead, we are going all-in with webviews. Why? Because we want to reach user input and text is very limiting. We also don’t want bots to have access to your private conversations, and we don’t want to pollute your conversations with bot commands." Source: Venture Beat
You can add bots to groups in WorkPlace Messenger which is a version of Messenger made just for businesses. Docs
