Sending messages with delay

Question

I'm implementing a Facebook Messenger Chatbot, and in one of the conversation flows, the bot is supposed to send 6 messages, one after the other.

I'd like those messages to be delayed by 1 second, and between them, display a sender action, to make the conversation feel natural (vs. dumping 6 messages all at once, which forces the user to scroll up to read them all).

I tried 2 different webhook implementations, but neither of them work. One was in Python/Flask: between each message, I've put time.sleep(delay), but it didn't work. The other was in Javascript/NodeJS: between each message, I've put setTimeout(function() {sendMessage(recipient_id);}, delay), but it also didn't work. Both versions work perfectly without the delay.

Can anyone help?

Answer 1

You can use settimeout for such scenarios. But for showing sender_action let's say if you want to show text like typing... from the bot inside messenger then facebook provides functionalities in its messenger API to include sender actions with different tags. Here is how I am doing it.

sender_action: 'typing...',
messaging_type: 'MESSAGE_TAG',
tag: 'NON_PROMOTIONAL_SUBSCRIPTION',

Please look into the following link for more information. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/send-messages/sender-actions

Answer 2

It'd be better if you provide more code when asking the question. I have the suspicion that you actually do this:

setTimeout(function() {sendMessage(recipient_id);}, delay)
setTimeout(function() {sendMessage(recipient_id);}, delay)
setTimeout(function() {sendMessage(recipient_id);}, delay)
setTimeout(function() {sendMessage(recipient_id);}, delay)
setTimeout(function() {sendMessage(recipient_id);}, delay)
setTimeout(function() {sendMessage(recipient_id);}, delay)

setTimeout is asynchronous, it means that your code will wait 1 second and then send 6 messages in a row. You're probably looking for something like this:

await setTimeout(function() {sendMessage(recipient_id);}, delay)
await setTimeout(function() {sendMessage(recipient_id);}, delay)
await setTimeout(function() {sendMessage(recipient_id);}, delay)
await setTimeout(function() {sendMessage(recipient_id);}, delay)
await setTimeout(function() {sendMessage(recipient_id);}, delay)
await setTimeout(function() {sendMessage(recipient_id);}, delay)

Answer 3

You can check out the wingbot library here on the github. It helps with building a simple bot. Like this:

const { Router } = require('wingbot');

const bot = new Router();

bot.use('start', (req, res) => {
   res.typingOn()
      .wait(1000)
      .text('Hello');
});

Answer 4

You can use the below code, it waits for 1 second and then replies back using async/await.

const messages = ["first", "second", "third", "forth", "fifth", "sixth"];

const sleep = delay => {
  return new Promise(function(resolve) {
    setTimeout(resolve, delay);
  });
};

const displayMessage = async messages => {
  for (let message of messages) {
    await sleep(1 * 1000);
    console.log(message);
  }
};

displayMessage(messages);