delay text output

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When trying to fake the interaction with a real human, the user expects that the other end needs some time to write the response. The send response settings should allow a non-zero delay in the answer.

Describe the solution you’d like

Either allow new Activity { Type = ActivityTypes.Typing } and new Activity { Type = "delay", Value= xxx } as separate dialog elements, or add a parameter in the send an activity UI to include this

Additional context

The framework allows the use of a typing indicator https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-builder-howto-send-messages?view=azure-bot-service-4.0&tabs=csharp

[reinoldus]

I switched to writing the bot in code entirely in the meantime.

What I am doing in my “code bot” is the following:

async def send_message(context, message: Dict[str, str]):
    if isinstance(context, WaterfallStepContext):
        context = context.context
    text = message['text']
    await context.send_activity(MessageFactory.text(text))
    sleep_time = (len(text.split(" ")) / 5)
    await asyncio.sleep(sleep_time)

In conjunction with: ADAPTER.use(ShowTypingMiddleware(delay=0.5, period=2.0))

So after each message has been sent, the bot waits len(text.split(" ")) / 5 seconds. The reasoning behind that is: This time frame is approximately the time an average reader needs to read the message just sent (https://capitalizemytitle.com/reading-time/1000-words/). In my tests that worked pretty well, because you do not want to wait for the bot to type, you just don’t want to be flooded with messages. So this is pretty much what @EricDahlvang described.

With all my new experience with implementing the bot in code, I would have loved to see these features in the composer:

• Have a general option that does what @EricDahlvang described.
• Have the option to delay each activity individually, because if you “quiz” a user about something, it feels more natural if the next question is delayed by a second or something (just my UX-experience)
• It would probably be helpful if one could set all these options by message type, so you can globally set a delay of e.g. 1 second for every “Prompt”-type.
• It is vital that all of these delays can be disabled easily so you can test it quickly without any waiting time.

I hope that clears up what I was looking for.

Thank you for your support!

[cwhitten]

@reinoldus I will re-open and transfer to https://github.com/microsoft/botbuilder-dotnet for continued discussion.