Chatbot features on WhatsApp

This article details the differences and limitations you may notice when implementing and interacting with an a Helpfruit chatbot on WhatsApp. 

These differences - eg in numbers of characters on a button - are because of WhatsApp's inherent channel limitations. Any application running on that channel would behave in the same way.

Welcome message

There is no Welcome Message displayed on WhatsApp by default.

A new conversation can be forced (eg for testing purposes) by typing GET_STARTED.

Buttons

• Button text is limited to 20 characters. Buttons longer than this will be truncated to 17 characters + ...
• Button message (message sent with buttons) – character limit is 1024 characters
• Buttons can only be clicked once, then are greyed out

Number of buttons

Limited to six. Only the first six buttons will be shown on this channel, in blocks of 3:

3 BUTTONS or fewer 

Buttons are attached to the message as shown

4-6 BUTTONS

Buttons are separated from the message, in two button blocks

Button limitations - affected features and examples

The following Helpfruit features are affected by this WhatsApp limitation. We recommend you review your use of these features prior to deploying your bot on WhatsApp:

• Engagements
• Follow-up questions
• Did you means
• Forms (if form context is collected)

Example - ENGAGEMENT

Example - FOLLOW UP

Image in answer

Displays as a separate message below the answer message 

On the web bot widget, images are displayed inline.

Links

Inline links in answer text 

URL is displayed in brackets after the link text. 

If the URL is long, you may wish to consider using a link shortening service (eg TinyURL, bit.ly)

Links in web search results

Link displayed in full (see example above). Link shortening not possible.

Text formatting

Not available in WhatsApp – answers are displayed as plain text.

Answer length

Long answers are truncated with a “read more” link:

4096 is the maximum number of characters for an answer message.

Web search results

Web search results are displayed as a list of messages in sequence (no carousel option). Links are displayed in full as noted above.

Also note formatting limitations, compared to web chatbot widget.

Recommendation

Limit web search results to maximum of 2, possibly fewer. This is set by Helpfruit team (admin feature). 

Video

Displayed as a link. This is different to the web experience, where YouTube videos play in the chat widget.