Sending Invitations to Participate in Facebook Messenger Bot

Question

I am very new to Messenger platform and I'm trying to wrap my head around the types of things that are possible. In particular, I'm interested in using a bot as a "mediator" of communication among friends. For example, one could build build a bot to help make a group decision, like where four or five people will have lunch. Each person interacts only with the bot, the bot gathers lunch preferences, and communicates some type of optimal choice to all participants. This could require a back-and-forth discussion of preferences with each participant. Is that clear?

At this point, I'm wondering two things:

• How would a user initially invite another user into the conversation? Suppose user A starts talking to the bot and the bot tells user A, "Invite some friends to join us in this conversation". Can the bot actually send these invitations on behalf of user A? Or does invitation have to take place via some other out-of-band mechanism?

• Is messenger platform the most appropriate FB platform technology for creating this sort of interactive mediation app?

Thanks in advance, InterWebs...

Answer 1

If I'm understanding your idea correctly, it would be very difficult to build a bot that could chat with each person separately but offer a shared experience. When a user shares the bot with another user and the new user starts a chat, the bot has no way of knowing where the referral comes from, so there's really no way to know that the two users are linked.

What you could do is build a chat extension, which basically makes functionality from your bot available in a group chat:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/guides/chat-extensions