Dynamic Conversation Experiences in the Zendesk Bot

Last year I wrote an article about using a combination of Ask for Details and API Calls in Zendesk Bot Builder to built a little Movie Bot based on the Open IMDB API.

Flow Builder - Ask for details

The new Ask For Details option in Flow Builder allows you to pull in contextual information via API into your Zendesk Chat Bot.

Internal NoteThomas Verschoren

That bot turned out great, but it was always limited by the features available in Bot Builder. Or more specifically, the lack of support for arrays and variables inside of the API calls made it impossible to chain API commands. So once a user picked a movie, I couldn‘t do anything based on that choice with another API call.

Now, almost a year later, Zendesk announced Dynamic Conversation Experiences for the bot, which greatly expand the features available in API calls with the addition of three new options:

• Support for Arrays in the API call so that we can more easily iterate over a bunch of results
• The Carousel step can now handle variables and arrays
• We can use variables inside of API calls

So let's dive in and build a better version of the Movie Bot!