Sending different types of messages from assistants

The Flow XO Assistant framework is a powerful way to create autonomous conversational agents to help with almost any area of your business, from customer service to internal productivity tools. Usually you see these kinds of assistants sending plain text messages, but you aren't limited to just simple text. Almost any kind of message Flow XO can send in a Flow, an assistant can send too if you ask it.

Here are the types of messages you can ask you assistants to send to your users:

* Text message (with or without quick reply choices)
* Images (with or without quick replies)
* Video
* Audio
* Cards
* Card sets

We created a really simple "Playground" assistant to show this in action. In these examples, we're asking the assistant to use specific message formats as a user, but in your own assistants you'll do this in your instructions, with prompts like:

"Send the recipe as a card, with three choices, 'Yummy', 'No thanks', and a link to the original recipe URL"

"When the user has confirmed their purchase, send them this gif with the caption 'Congratulations!': https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExeHp1YzBpcDFzanluZHQwZGVuYW53MXF3eW10d212em4zemtrNjY5aSZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/artj92V8o75VPL7AeQ/giphy.gif"

Here's a screenshot showing a chat session with our playground assistant that shows each of the different message types available so far:

For those of you already familiar with Flow XO's message types, sending more than one card will send a "Card Set" - which displays as a carousel in Facebook Messenger.

If you want to create a similar playground assistant for yourself, it's extremely easy, here's what our configuration looks like:

Happy flowing!