Once you have created and launched your bot on Teams, the next step is to start building your message.
When you go to your message list, you will have your Welcome Message already created and ready to edit. Click the message title or edit button to go into the message to start updating. Once you have done that, you will see the message builder:
As you can see, you have the title at the top - you can change this at any time so don't feel you have to have the precise title straight away. It's good practice to keep your title clear though, so you can find it easily later in the message list later on.
On the left you have your preview panel, which shows you what your bot will look like as your build.
On the right, you have your message parts panel. Here's what each message part does:
Media
You can hover over media to add images to your bot. An image message part can consist of either a jpg, GIF or png. Images or GIFs must not exceed 1024 ×1024 px or 125KB. Once you click on "Image" a grey placeholder image will come up. Simply click on that to upload any image/GIF from your drive.
Text and buttons
Text parts allow you to add text to your bot. You can also add emojis to your text parts by clicking on the smiley face on the right hand side. Please note - if you want to include line breaks in your text, then please use <br> to break up the text accordingly.
You can add more than one text part to your message, although we recommend not going over five as it might annoy the user with too many pings.
You can also add buttons to your text part which allows the user to:
• trigger the next message
• open a URL
• save data to an attribute and trigger the next message
Please note that you can only add up to 6 buttons per text part.
Carousel
A carousel is often used to contain the main topics and top strands of your conversation which we refer to as the Main Menu. A carousel can have a maximum of 10 cards. Each card has to have an image and a title. We also suggest that it has a subtitle and a button. The title and the subtitle can have a maximum of 80 characters each. Each card can have a maximum of 6 buttons. A carousel image should have an aspect ratio of 16:9, not be more than 420px wide/125KB in size.
Delay
A delay is the short space of time between text messages on the screen that will allow the user a few seconds to read the messages. The delay is in milliseconds so 1000 would be 1 second. Calculating delays doesn't have to be difficult - we recommend using 1000 for every line of text in your text message part.
Q&A
Q&As can be used for surveys or quizzes and allows a user to use free text rather than multiple choice – useful for gathering an address or specific feedback. You can find out how to set this up here.
Attributes
Hovering over Attributes allows you to select a set or clear attributes part. Attributes are a great way to save user data to the bot database. You can add this message part to any message where you want to log where the user has been within the bot. For example, you could set an attribute in the final message of a survey so you know which user has completed it. You can find out more about attributes here.
Webhooks
The webhook message part allows you to do some more advanced work with your bot. We recommend you contact us to talk through any projects that involve webhooks or middleware so we can help to come up with the best solution. You can find out more about webhooks and APIs in our dev docs.
Reordering your message parts
You can change the order of your message parts by hovering your cursor to the left hand side of the each part. You will see a set of arrows show up, corresponding to each box . You can move the message part up by clicking the up arrow or vice versa.
