How to use sender actions for messenger with rasa?

Rasa Open Source
1

Hello Rasa Community!

I am building a chatbot that will operate in Facebook’s messenger. I would like my chatbot to be able to display a typing indicator as in the images below.

image image

As Facebook docs states I can achieve that by sending a POST request to Send API (details here). Can someone please guide me on how to achieve this? I’ve tried doing this with a custom action but it doesn’t seem to work. Also, is there a way to send this POST request automatically before any other message my bot sends?

Thanks in advance!

2

You could do this by customizing the Facebook Messenger channel. The source code is in the rasa git repo here.

3

Thank you very much @stephens! I finally managed to make this work with your help :smiley: