Basic building blocks

Before we move on to build our bot, let's look at the basic building blocks:

• Blocks
• Cards
• Buttons
• Plugins
• Attributes

Blocks

Go back to the editor and look at the Bot Structure tab. Under Bot Structure, you will find two types of blocks—built-in and user-defined. Welcome message and Default answer are the two built-in blocks. We will be building user-defined blocks to implement the conversation capability of the chatbot. Each block can be thought of as a response segment of the chatbot. Each block can contain one or more cards.

Cards

Cards are constructs that are used to send messages to the deployment platform. There are many types of cards. Text cards are the basic type of cards; they carry text messages and optional buttons. Other cards include images, quick replies (button arrays), lists, and gallery. We will investigate each of these later.

Buttons

Most cards have buttons. Buttons are used to provide users with response options. Users can respond to the chatbot's questions...