Can Lex start the conversation?

Question

I want to create a Lex bot that would send a welcome message every time the chat gets opened. Does anyone know if this is possible?

Answer 1

It should depend on the channel you are going to use, but I know that Lex itself cannot initiate a conversation. Also, channels like Facebook Messenger highly discourage bots that initiate a chat because it could become flagged as a spam bot.

However, you could definitely build a workaround to do it, but that will have to be channel specific and outside of Lex. Perhaps as simple as detecting a user opens a chat, and send a "hello" to Lex from that user yourself so that Lex replies with the welcome message. But something like that depends completely on the channel you use.

Word of Warning: Initiating a conversation may violate a user agreement or developer guidelines of Amazon Lex, or the chat channel your bot uses, so I don't suggest doing so.