Automatically emailing a copy of conversation history

Many chatbots offer the option of emailing the user a copy of the conversation history. Traditionally this has been done by writing code server side, but with the latest version of the web widget associated with Watson Assistant it is really easy to implement this with a small bit of client side code.

The code to implement this can be downloaded from GitHub. What you need to do is:

1. Place the code contained in the history_template.html file somewhere in the header part of your web site's page. 
2. Modify the INTEGRATION_ID, REGION_ID and INSTANCE_ID variables to match your Watson Assistant instance.
3. Create an account on elasticmail.com if you don't already have one. Then insert the SMTP_HOST, SMTP_USERNAME, SMTP_PASSWORD and FROM_ADDRESS in the javascript code.

The code is fairly easy to understand, but here are a few pointers:

• The start and end of the code block is the same as the web widget which is provided for you by the Watson Assistant UI. In fact accessing this widget is the easiest way to get the correct values for the integrationID:, region:, and serviceInstanceID: variables.
• The code registers a number of event handlers:
• The histHandler() function gets called when the chat window is opened. The event passed contains the history which has been stored client side. This is used to construct the initial email contents and store it in the global variable historyText.
• The msgSent() and msgReceived() functions are called when a message is sent by the end user and by Watson respectively. They update the global variable historyText.
• Last, but not least the msgSent() event handler gets called whenever the chat window is closed/minimised. This calls the sendEmail() function described below.
• The sendEmail() function implements the actual sending of the email. The documentation for this javascript library suggests that any arbitrary SMTP server can be used, but I found that it wouldn't work with any SMTP agent apart from smtp.elasticemail.com. The value of the From: variable indicates where the email will appear to be coming from - this will have to be the email address you used to create the account on ElasticMail. Be careful what address you use - this is where any replies will be sent.

If you want to customise the look and feel of the chat history emails, edit the variable baseHistoryText and/or change the watsonMsg() and userMsg() functions.

I hope you find this sample useful. As always this code is provided on a As-Is basis. No warranty or support is offered.