Chat API

The Chat API allows you to send chat requests to your bot on behalf of an end user. You can send a text request, and receive the bot's response in return.

This API works synchronously by default: you will receive all of the bot's messages in one array in response to your request.

POST /chat

You can query the Chat API by sending a simple text message for analysis. This will either continue any previous conversation or start a new one.

# replace the x-api-key and x-api-signature values with your data
curl -X "POST" "https://clients.csml.dev/v1/api/chat" \
     -H 'content-type: application/json' \
     -H 'accept: application/json' \
     -H 'x-api-key: ${API_KEY}' \
     -d $'{
            "client": {
              "user_id": "some-user-id"
            },
            "metadata": {
              "firstname": "John",
              "lastname": "Doe"
            },
            "request_id": "random-id",
            "payload": {
              "content": {
                "text": "Hello"
              },
              "content_type": "text"
            }
          }'

Valid request message payloads

The following message types are accepted (see below for payload examples): text, image, video, audio, file, url, payload, flow_trigger.

Additional properties can be added to the message's content and will be available as event.my_added_prop in the context of the CSML.

Triggering a specific flow

To trigger a specific flow, you can send the following event:

{
  "client": {
    "user_id": "some-user-id"
  },
  "metadata": {
    "key": "value",
    "otherkey": "othervalue"
  },
  "request_id": "random-id",
  "payload": {
    "content": {
      "flow_id": "some-flow-id",
      "close_flows": true
    },
    "content_type": "flow_trigger"
  }
}

You can also choose to force-close any previously open conversation with close_flows. If you don't close previous conversations and the flow is a recursive flow (i.e has no hold keywords), then the previous conversation will be relaunched at the last available step in that flow.

Request body

Name	Type	Description
*metadata	object	Key-value pairs of metadata to inject into the conversation
request_id	string	A random client-issued string for tracing requests. If none is provided, will be automatically generated.
*payload	object	see message payload definitions
*payload.content_type	string
*payload.content	object
*client	object
*client.user_id	string	the user's unique identifier

{
  "client": {
    "user_id": "some-user-id"
  },
  "metadata": {
    "key": "value",
    "otherkey": "othervalue"
  },
  "request_id": "random-id",
  "payload": {
    "content": {
      "text": "Hello"
    },
    "content_type": "text"
  }
}

Response body

Name	Type	Description
request_id	string	A random client-issued string for tracing requests. If none is provided, will be automatically generated
conversation_end	boolean	Whether the flow ends after this message
*messages	array	All the messages to send to the client in order
*message.payload	object	See Message payloads below
*client	object
*client.bot_id	string	the bot's ID
*client.channel_id	string	the channels's ID
*client.user_id	string	the user's unique identifier
*received_at	string	UTC time at which the message was received by the CSML server

{
  "request_id": "045338c4-f214-4f94-b1a7-3255b3d70f3c",
  "messages": [
    {
      "conversation_id": "f2461d23-6069-4f78-ae81-f127e4c3d9a0",
      "direction": "SEND",
      "interaction_order": 0,
      "payload": {
        "content": {
          "text": "Some message"
        },
        "content_type": "text"
      }
    }
  ],
  "client": {
    "bot_id": "b797a3b6-ad8c-446c-acfe-dfcafd787f4e",
    "channel_id": "dd446008-3768-41df-9be9-f6ea0371f920",
    "user_id": "some-user-id"
  },
  "received_at": "2019-11-16T17:48:26.519Z"
}