How to Integrate Kata Bot to Qiscus Multichannel?

One of many features Qiscus Multichannel has to offer is a bot integration. This feature will make sure any incoming messages to be handled by bot. Therefore, in this article we would cover on how we can connect a bot to Qiscus Multichannel. We will use Kata Bot as our use case. Let's say we already created a bot in Kata, called PizzaBot. Now, how do we integrate this bot to Qiscus Multichannel in order for this bot to be able to handle any incoming messages?

Let's dig in further.

Login to Qiscus Multichannel

First, you will need to have a Qiscus Multichannel account (absolutely). If you don't have any, you can create a new one by registering directly via Qiscus Multichannel and proceed with login.

As soon as you logged in, go to the integration page and choose the Bot Integration tab and you'll see there are two fields.

The field of Bot Webhook URL, will be filled with bot webhook URL we got from Kata later. We will get this URL when we add qiscus channel in Kata Platform. You may want to keep Qiscus Agent ID and Qiscus Secret Key values as those two will be needed when we are creating a new channel in Kata Platform.

Adding Qiscus Channel via Kata Platform

There are a couple ways to add Qiscus channel in Kata. First, adding channel directly from Kata Platform. And the other way is by doing so through Kata CLI. You are free to follow both of them. In this article, we will only cover the first one, using Kata Platform.

I assume you have published your progress and have deployed at least once to the Kata server. Otherwise you can follow along this document on how to deploy your bot in Kata. There are three steps to deploy your bot based on the article: Deploy, Create Environment, and Add Channel. Here, we will only cover how to add Qiscus channel. For more information about how to deploy and create environment, please follow along the article above.

Now, Let’s add Qiscus channel.

Choose one of your environments and click “Create Channel” button. In the dialog panel, fill in the required information and don’t forget to choose “Qiscus” as channel type.

Some notes here:

• Secret Ket is the Qiscus Secret Key you can get from Qiscus Multichannel dashboard you kept earlier
• Bot Email is Qiscus Agent ID, and
• URL is the provided URL in Qiscus Multichannel dashboard.

After you fill in all the credentials, just click “Create” button and you will be generated a unique URL for this channel, as depicted in the image below.

Copy that unique URL and paste it on the Bot Webhook URL field in the Qiscus Multichannel and click connect button.

That's it for bot integration. Next we need to make sure our bot is working on Qiscus Multichannel.

Bot testing in Qiscus Multichannel

Let's test our bot integration by activate Facebook Messenger channel. To do so, you just need to go to the Facebook Messenger tab and follow the steps written on the tab page, literally. That's it! Now let's test our bot.

Just go to the Bot Page and hit the Send Message button and try to have a conversation. You will get messages on the Page as well as replies from bot.