Hey Product Hunt!
So excited to be sharing this with you. If you’re anything like me, you probably fill in web forms dozens of times every week. Many of these forms are confusing, long and just plain ugly. Products like TypeForm have done a lot to make this better, but the experiences are still tied to the web and following up with survey respondents is still really troublesome and difficult.
To solve these problems, Lucie and I built chatform.ai and made it available as an open source project. Chatform lets anyone build a form or survey that they can then distribute over messaging channels like Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Telegram, LINE, Viber and others.
I've written a bit more on it on Medium here: https://medium.com/@gozmike/turn...
Have fun, play with the code and build something of your own!
I rarely get excited about open source as much as I'm excited about this project @gozmike. Thank you for sharing this with the world! Can't wait to start playing with it :)
Awesome use case for Chat bots (IMO). How would a customer get to this form? Wouldn't they need to activate the chat? (Link-through, I'm guessing?) Does the chat stay open or connect to anything that could possibly later down the road provide promo codes, coupons, or marketing initiatives? Love the Chatform intro video, btw!
@as_austin Thanks Austin. There's a bunch of ways a customer can get to this form:
* You can embed the Smooch Web Messenger (https://github.com/smooch/smooch-js) into any element of your web app, it works particularly well for onboarding (see: https://app.smooch.io/signup) for an example
* You can link users to your identity on a messaging app, for instance: http://telegram.me/chatformdemobot on Telegram
* You can (soon) trigger the form to be sent in a message you send to a customer who reaches out to you over messaging, so say you're providing support over Facebook Messenger and have decided to send the customer a shipping address form, you can define a form that is triggered by a keyword like "/send order_form" and chatform.ai will take over and take the user through the form.
* If you have a mobile app, you can add the Smooch iOS and Android SDKs to the app and have a messaging dialogue in the app.
* You can even have chatform run surveys for you over SMS or E-Mail
This product is almost stellar, but it loses me at only integrating with chat applications. I'd love to have something web native. An easy-to-build convo form that I could drop code on to my contact page would be killer!
@prestonattebery actually it integrates with Smooch, so the web messenger is available as well. You can embed the web messenger into any
or container element on your web page and its entirely open source as well: https://github.com/smooch/smooch-js
You can see an example of it running in action on Smooch's signup flow here: https://app.smooch.io/signup - of course, you can style the web messenger to look however you'd like it to look :-)
Hey Mike, I have a couple of questions:
1. Can you give an example of when I would like to convert a form into a chat bot on any website or at all to throw someone off my website into messenger? Of course I would like my forms to be more friendly, but with the current limited number of options of how bots can be implemented in the communication between my and my users - I wouldn't think of using a bot as I would lose both conversions (throwing them off my website) or brand awareness (the state of UI design in ALMOST any bot I've seen is terrible and can never emotionally connect a user to any product).
This all might change and maybe bot UIs will get better or people will be used to be thrown off websites, but I would love to hear your opinion on this regarding today.
2. A form made with Typeform (I'm not affiliated with them in any way) can be displayed as a native, responsive, nice looking web page with a decent UX to it. Smooch integrates with this weird button that looks like Intercom but isn't, or triggered by a button that says it will throw you off the site. That kind of sucks. I would prefer a regular nicely designed web form over this any day. Wouldn't you? Which brings me to my next point...
3. I'm really curious to know... If you believe in this concept of yours, why does the form to sign up to your site stay as a regular web form? and why doesn't your "example" form display any type of real scenario? it only says "say hello to start". Why would I want to start??
I believe we still have a long way to go with chat bots in terms of design and implementation on the web.
I know I'm sounding like a hater here, but I would REALLY want to be called out and have anybody change my mind about this, because the plain concept of your product sounds awesome! But once I think whether I can implement it in any of my projects - I can't find even one solid example.
So, would love to hear your opinion Mike, and anyone else here as well.
Please call me out. Please change my mind.
Hi @sagishrieber, thanks so much for your comment!
Chatform was an experiment we worked on in the context of a hackathon, it's meant to raise these questions and (hopefully) to help answer some of them too!
1. A great example is on-boarding. We've had considerable success at Smooch using conversational on-boarding to activate usage of the product and collect market research information. Try it out at http://app.smooch.io/signup
Another great example is within the context of an existing customer service chat. In many chats (and we've seen a great deal at Smooch!), there is an element of conversational form filling that already occurs. Processes like collecting a shipping address, gathering feedback on a customer service interaction, etc... all lend themselves to be easily taken over by a bot instead of being manned by a human.
The advantage here is that you can deploy these forms on whatever medium your interaction is happening on, so if you're conversing with someone via SMS, no reason to bring them to the web to get the information you need - use a form bot.
2. Smooch actually integrates with 11 different messaging channels, only one of which is the web messenger. The web messenger itself, unlike other solutions is completely open source and customizable. Here's an example that I put together showing how to drop a conversational form into just about any element on a web page (you can even make it full screen): https://codepen.io/gozmike/pen/Z...
3. It's a hackathon project, and was built in less than 20 hours of work 😀, I just didn't have time to make the sign up form as great as I would like it to be. Since the project is open source, I invite you to make a pull request and add it yourself! As I mentioned earlier, my company, Smooch.io, has been successfully using conversational onboarding for almost a year now. Chris Messina hunted it a year ago (https://www.producthunt.com/post...) and there's been some good discussion on that page regarding the usefulness of this approach.
Hope this answers some of your questions, feel free to reach out, play around with the project on github and explore. Conversations aren't the ideal solution for everything but I think in some cases, they can be awesome for forms and surveys.
Nice use case. Could you speak to some ways or use cases that would drive users to open a conversation with this type of bot?
For instance I will never open an email that's asking me to rate my recent ____ activity.
Would love to know as people experiment with bots whether the participation rate beats email or other feedback channels.
@ggnall great question Graham.
We've found product onboarding to be a great use case for this kind of flow. You can see it in action on the Smooch signup form here: https://app.smooch.io/signup
We've also seen it useful for order taking. Some Smooch.io customers have a form filling bot set up to trigger on a "/new order" command on the messaging channel. When this happens, the bot takes the user through the process of capturing a shipping address directly within the conversation flow.
Surely there are many more use cases, this is one of the reasons we built the tool and made it open source - we'd love to see more thoughts and experiments in this area
@inthecompanyof@sap323 if it's running on your own heroku deployment, you should check the logs and see. you're probably missing a configuration parameter...
Hey Product Hunt!
So excited to be sharing this with you. If you’re anything like me, you probably fill in web forms dozens of times every week. Many of these forms are confusing, long and just plain ugly. Products like TypeForm have done a lot to make this better, but the experiences are still tied to the web and following up with survey respondents is still really troublesome and difficult.
To solve these problems, Lucie and I built chatform.ai and made it available as an open source project. Chatform lets anyone build a form or survey that they can then distribute over messaging channels like Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Telegram, LINE, Viber and others.
I've written a bit more on it on Medium here: https://medium.com/@gozmike/turn...
Have fun, play with the code and build something of your own!
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