Send and receive files or attachments

You can use the Flow.ai platform to integrate your AI bot with external services. That's also where sending and receiving files or attachments come in handy.

Sending files can be useful when working with receipts, ticket or other documents. A common data type that is used for sending file is .pdf. Receiving files from an end-user is a less populair feature but can be used to receive document or pdf files.

In this guide we will show you how to send and receive files.

Hosting files

To allow the sending and receiving of files within Flow.ai, it is important to first host the files and set them public. This can be done with hosting services like Google Cloud, Imgur or AWS. After this is done, the URLs of the hosted files can be easily copied and pasted into the Flow.ai platform.

Sending files

We start with creating a new flows and a text trigger. Then we drag & drop the File Reply onto the canvas. Add a title and url to corresponding file and we're done.

Receiving files

In order to receive a file we create a new flow and this time we add the File Trigger. That means that whenever the user uploads a file when being at corresponding step in a Flow, the bot continues.

Other Media: Images, Videos, Audio and location

Besides sending and receiving files, similar steps can be used to reproduce a flow that contains images, videos, audio or location. This allows you to create rich experiences and integrate your chatbot solutions with other services.