Human in the loop

Botpress allows you to build a powerful tool for autonomous communication with your users. However there may be cases where it is difficult or very resource-consuming to implement a conversation flow within the bot. At this point you may consider having a human take over the conversation and continue to communicate with your user.

The Human-in-the-Loop (hitl) module allows you to do just that!

Human-in-the-Loop is currently supported on channel-web and channel-messenger.

Once you have this module installed, you will be able to:

  1. Pause a user's conversation with the bot
  2. Alert your agents that a conversation requires attention
  3. As an agent you will be able to continue the conversation via the admin-panel
  4. Resume conversation with the bot

Pausing conversation

There are several ways you can pause the conversation:

  • from the HITL module, toggling the pause button

Pause button

  • by performing an API-request:

    let base = EXTERNAL_URL + '/api/v1/bots/' + botId + '/mod/hitl

    • POST {$base}/sessions/{$id}/pause
    • POST {$base}/sessions/{$id}/unpause
    • POST {$base}/channel/{$channel}/user/{$userId}/pause
    • POST {$base}/channel/{$channel}/user/{$userId}/unpause

For example: POST http://localhost:3000/api/v1/bots/welcome-bot/mod/hitl/sessions/13/pause

Alerting agents

There are a number of ways to alert your agents of a paused conversation, an email, a call to an external API or, as in the example below, via a notification in the admin-panel:

const { botId } = event
const message = user.first_name + ' wants to talk to a human'
bp.notifications.create(botId, { message, level: 'info', url: '/modules/hitl' })

The agent can then navigate to the appropriate conversation and take over the conversation from the bot.

Resuming conversation

Once the agent is done communicating with the user, they can unpause the conversation.

It is also possible for the user to unpause the conversation by calling the API endpoint.

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