Hide the soft keyboard in Facebook Messenger Bot

Question

Hi I'm writing a Facebook Messenger bot that has a few nice looking card actions - that end up taking up a large portion of the chat window. The problem is that the soft keyboard on phones such as iPhone and Android still displays, constraining the visible area of the chat to an even smaller window, obscuring the card.

Is there a way I can send some sort of specific JSON down in my bot messages to indicate to FB Messenger that the keyboard should be hidden until the user clicks back into the message entry area?

Thanks.

Answer 1

One option could be is using the Persist Menu feature and set the composer_input_disabled property to true.

From the docs:

Disables the Messenger composer field if set to true. This means your bot can only be interacted with via the persistent menu, postbacks, buttons, and webviews.

Some useful links:

• Microsoft Bot Framework .NET - Add a persistent menu to your Facebook Messenger chatbot
• Adding Menu and Buttons to your messenger bot
• Add Persistent Menu and Buttons to your messenger bot

Answer 2

As Ezequiel pointed out. You can use the persistent menu feature for Facebook Messenger. If you are using the .NET SDK check out the sample I created:

https://github.com/FranciscoPonceGomez/Persistent-Menu-Facebook