Chatbot Typing Animation not working?

Not sure what this setting in the WordPress plugin does. Maybe @intelahelp can chime in and elaborate on this?

For me, this is what works:

Create a pause in the dialog node of the IBM Watson Assistant skill and enable the typing indicator, see screenshot.

This will display the typing animation in the chat. Also when integrated with this WordPress plugin.

Very interesting, thank you @nicoter.

After you mentioned this I did a little digging and found this earlier plugin support discussion.

This suggests to me that this was a client-side effect, but that now v2 API supports service-side effect, the plugin devs may have removed support for the client-side effect but forgotten to remove the switch.

The problems with the service-side effect are
1. it is an artificial pause in addition to the (in my experience too long) network delay.
2. it must be manually added to each dialog node, and if later we want to remove the effect, we need to go back through all nodes and remove them one at a time.

Neither of those make sense to me.

@intelahelp please consider supporting the plugin’s typing effect long term. It is an added feature superior to the service side implementation. Ideally, you would offer the option to only run the animation while actually waiting for the service to reply. This would allow the system to “look alive” but never have dialog artificially slowed.

Hello @brucetm.

Thank you for the proposed idea, this feature is included in the plan and will appear in one of the next updates.

If you have more questions, don’t hesitate to ask them.

Currently I added the pause to every dialogue node. It was a pain but I made the length of them varying pending on the length of the reply the boot is supposed to deliver. I think the end result was quite OK. Having a function only showing the typing effect while waiting for a network reply would be great.

(I noticed this plugin is removed as from today. I hope it is only temporary because I really like this plugin. I would not use Watson assistant without it).

Thank you @alwaysenthusiast. We are looking into it.

Hello @brucetm, @alwaysenthusiast.
We released the new version of plugin (0.8.26) that has the typing animation settings. Please update your plugin to the latest version and let us know if the issue persists.

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