1. Language IO
  2. Zendesk Support
  3. Zendesk Chatbot

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What is the Language IO Zendesk Chatbot and how does it work?

What Web Messenger Widget does Language IO use?

Zendesk currently offers two types of Web Messaging widgets: the legacy Web Chat Widget and the new and improved Zendesk Messaging. You can enable both solutions easily from the Admin Center. Sunshine Web Messenger, a third-party widget recently acquired by Zendesk, is an additional option.

Businesses can take advantage of a number of features from either Sunshine Web Messenger, Zendesk Messenger, or Legacy Web Chat Widget. These features include:

  • real-time messaging
  • chatbots
  • file sharing, and
  • tool integrations.

Sunshine Web Messenger provides extra features such as

  • in-app messaging
  • push notifications, and
  • the capacity to modify the chat widget.

The inability to intercept incoming customer messages as well as outgoing messages from Zendesk Answer Bot and translate them using the Language IO Translate API before showing the chat message to the customer is another important limitation of Zendesk Messenger and legacy Web Chat.

For all these reasons, Language IO uses Sunshine Web Messenger as a platform.

Dialogue and Translation Flow

Knowing what parts of the dialogue and translation flow are managed by the bot or by Language IO can help you diagnose issues or bugs if they occur. This section describes first the flow of a user with the Sunshine Web Messenger, and second the escalation flow if the user requests to continue the conversation with a human agent. 

When a customer initiates a conversation with the Zendesk Answer Bot in Sunshine Web Messenger, the following flow occurs:

  1. Customer sends a chat message in Sunshine Chat Messenger.
  2. Sunshine Chat Messenger determines the language locale of the customer.
    • The language locale is determined based on the current locale of the browser:
      • if the browser locale is not en_US (English), then that is used by default.
      • If the browser locale is en_US, the plugin calls the Language IO API to determine the customer's locale.
  3. Sunshine Chat Messenger's beforeSend event intercepts the customer message and calls the Language IO API to translate the message.
  4. Sunshine Chat Messenger sends the translated message to Zendesk Answer Bot.
  5. Zendesk Answer Bot sends a reply.
  6. Sunshine Chat Messenger’s beforeDisplay event intercepts the reply from the Zendesk Answer Bot and calls the Language IO API to translate the message into the customer's language.
  7. Sunshine Chat Messenger shows the translated reply to the customer

If there is a conversation handoff to an English-speaking Zendesk Agent in Sunshine Web Messenger:

  1. Customer sends a chat message in Sunshine Chat Messenger.
  2. Sunshine Chat Messenger calls the Language IO API to determine the language locale of the customer.
  3. Sunshine Chat Messenger calls the Language IO API to translate the customer message into English.
  4. Sunshine Chat Messenger sends the translated message to the Agent.
  5. The agent types their reply and send it.
  6. Sunshine Chat Messenger intercepts the agent's reply and calls the Language IO API to translate the message into the customer's language.
  7. Sunshine Chat Messenger shows the translated reply to the customer.

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