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Hi HN,

I'm launching Choosify (https://choosify.chat), a website plugin for live chat / customer support.

It allows you to chat with website visitors directly via Slack. Conversations can be partially automated using a flow builder.

The main reasons for developing Choosify are:

1) Chatbot platforms like Dialogflow are too complicated for the average user regarding input/output context.

2) Intercom is terribly expensive :)

Recently more Intercom alternatives have been launched (cough Papercups (YC S20) cough). However, Choosify is unique in the way it allows you to set up automated messages and responses.

I hope this will help you to talk to your customers. The free tier should be sufficient for the average user. (Billing is not yet implemented, so it's 100% free for now.)

Features:

- Customizable lightweight plugin

- Automated replies using code-free flow builder

- Reply from Slack

- Free tier and affordable pricing based on how many messages you send/receive

- Golang backend, Vue/Nuxt.js frontend

Please let me know your thoughts. Any feedback is welcome, thanks!

As a customer, I hate chatbots. They make it harder to look up information, mainly because one has to guess the correct keywords to trigger the wanted answer. I prefer any other UI over chatbots.

But since you are now into chatbots, here is a thing: What about exposing the configuration to users? This way, you could offer customers an alternative way of digging throught the informations encoded within the chatbot. I guess a lot of people would prefer that.

You mean a 'Chatbot to FAQ page' exporter? Interesting idea, but the best way to navigate such a page with nested questions would probably be something that looks similar to a chat interface :)

What are the reasons why you hate chatbots most? Don't you think most them are solved using hybrid human-bot responses?

Most chat windows are styled as if a human was sitting at the other end. It is very annoying to learn just by the quality of answers that it is only a bot answering.

I can scan information on a lengthy FAQ page or a knowledge database much faster then I can interact with a chatbot. Just imagine the interface to the Google search would be a chatbot. That's ridicolous. A well-done search page which searches over on any kind of website is a better interface then a chatbot.