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Mike Gozzo

Conversation Extensions by Smooch.io - Go beyond the boundaries of the chat window

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Create custom interactive experiences that sit on top of the chat window and work across all messaging channels. Combine the intimacy and contextuality of conversational interfaces with the flexibility and richness of traditional web UIs. Help users complete the most complex tasks without ever having to leave the conversation.

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Mike Gozzo
Maker
Hey folks! 👋 It's been a while since our last launch on Product Hunt and I'm so happy to have something awesome to share with you all. We've been heads down for the last year focussing on traction as we work with our customers to power the next generation of conversational software. Today, we're coming up for some air and showing off Conversation Extensions - a new toolkit to create custom interactive experiences that sit on top of the chat window and work across all messaging channels that Smooch supports. We built this because although we are big fans of the expressiveness of conversational UIs, sometimes a dialog with a human or a bot isn't the easiest and most efficient way to get something done. Conversation Extensions allow you to inject "traditional" UIs into the conversation you or your bot is having with your user. These extensions provide a complete canvas upon which you can really run almost any kind of interaction, all while maintaining contextual awareness of what's going on in the conversation. Best of all, getting started with Conversation Extensions is easy - they're based on standard web technologies like HTML, JavaScript and CSS. You can even repurpose code from your existing web apps. We're including a variety of different pre-built extensions as sample code as well as Javascript libraries that make it easy for your extension to be aware of who the user that is interacting with it is and what was said in the conversation that is presenting the extension. Since soft launching this a few weeks ago, we've seen customers build hotel room reservation systems, e-commerce order forms, interactive quizzes in e-learning bots and more. We're now more excited than ever about the possibilities that open up when you combine the expressiveness of conversational UI with the rich, efficient interactions possible in more traditional UI. Looking forward to your questions and can't wait to see what you build!
Joseph Hsieh
Really interesting, and I like how flexible the interface of this "canvas" can be. However, can you help share some use cases or experiences where embedding a chat on top of a web/app and then embedding extensions make sense? Why not just build the web app outside of the conversation and point the user to it from the chat?
Mike Gozzo
Maker
@webjoe thanks Joe! Here are some use cases: 1. Deliver a consistent UI across web/mobile delivered at exactly the right moment in a conversation and accessible only when it makes sense. 2. Deliver a UI to capture data or present content on channels other than embeddable SDKs (say FB Messenger, WeChat, Twitter, Apple Business Chat, etc...). 3. Keep the user in the chat conversation (eg, during a sales chat) by only partially occluding the chat window to display the conversation UI
Chris Colleran
Congrats! The team at Sciensio is excited about the potential Conversation Extensions open up for us.
Mike Gozzo
Maker
@chris_colleran thanks Chris! How do you think you'll use this in your event bots?
Chris Colleran
@gozmike As you know we build EventBots, while chat works for many of our use cases we frequently need to present lists that are more than a handful of items. We find that to be a poor experience in chat. In addition we would love to be able to show interactive maps of the venues.
Arpit Choudhury
What are the odds of Drift's Developer Platform being hunted on the same day? How do you guys feel about that?
Mike Gozzo
Maker
@irhymeth super exciting, we're big fans of Drift and have spent a bunch of time with their team - the products are in no way competitive.
Arpit Choudhury
@gozmike Ah then my bad. I somehow thought that this is pretty much like the newly launched developer platform by Drift that allows others to create apps inside drift conversations to add more context, etc.
Mike Gozzo
Maker
@irhymeth Thought I'd add a little more here: Drift is doing a great job solving a specific problem for businesses – sales and marketing qualification - through messaging and chatbots. At Smooch we’re focused on giving any software company the tools to build messaging capabilities into their platform. Drift would actually be among the companies we sell to, so that they can build the products that they do. You can check out our website to see some other examples of customers that we work with. Conversation Extensions power a variety of use cases (customer support, ecommerce, etc.) and they work on any Smooch-integrated channel (Facebook Messenger, web SDKs, etc.). Our hope is that this feature will find its way into a variety of different software products that are built on Smooch.
Arpit Choudhury
@gozmike Thanks so much for the detailed clarification. This is really interesting. Been thinking about implementing a chat based booking engine into our product, nwook.com (m.me/nwookster). Would love to explore this more!
Vlad Korobov

We integrated smooch in 1 client project and happy so far

Pros:

Strong solution with free plan

Cons:

Communication could be managed only from Smooch panel

Mike Gozzo
Maker
Hi Vlad, Thanks for your feedback. I'm trying to understand your comment "Communication could only be managed from Smooch panel" Typically, our clients use our REST API : https://docs.smooch.io/rest/ to interact with our service as it provides all of the functionality our web UI provides and more. Can you share a little bit more about how you're using Smooch? Best, Mike
Rudy Lee
Wow this is not only interesting but the UI is also built amazingly! :D