Article by Leo Barros, May 2023
Introduction
Oracle Digital Assistant is an AI-powered platform for building chatbots across various channels, including messaging platforms like WhatsApp. One of the most effective ways to integrate your digital assistant with external systems, such as the WhatsApp channel, is using webhooks.
WhatsApp is the most widely used messaging platform with 2 billion active users around the world, 100 billion messages sent on an everyday basis, and 1 billion users added freshly over the last 4. WhatsApp is a space to build profound relationships with customers to achieve a higher conversion rate, boost sales, and automatically lower marketing costs.
A webhook is a programming interfaces implemented by a system on the web for other programs subscribe and to receive automated notification in case anything of interest happens. One such system is chatbot. Users "register" for a chatbot through a messenger client and by sending messages to the bot. The bot then resolves the request, processes it, and returns a response that the original sender receives. Webhook clients are like adapters that dispatch and manage conversation between a user and a remote system.
In this guide, we will walk you through the process of creating a webhook channel in Oracle Digital Assistant and building a webhook code in Node.js to integrate the WhatsApp API with your chatbot. It is interesting to say that using this code template, you will be able to interact via rich elements with your user, such as buttons, agent integration, image, video, audio, and list of options.
