Make Welcome Bot more interactive

At present, Welcome Bot gives the user lots of information all at once. It may be unappealing to process so much content when one is just starting to explore a new app. Also, the bot doesn’t offer motivation to engage with it, which would draw the user into sending their first Zulip messages.

To try to address this, we should make the Welcome Bot more interactive. In can provide a small amount of key information to start with, offering to teach the user more upon request.

An initial set of messages to be implemented is described below. In general, we should make it easy to create additional message/response interactions.

New initial messages

For a non-admin user

Hello, and welcome to Zulip! This is a private message from me, Welcome Bot. If you are new to Zulip, check out our Getting started guide!

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I can help you get set up! Just click anywhere on this message or press r to reply. Here are a few messages I understand: “apps”, “edit profile”, “dark mode”, ”light mode”, “streams”, and “topics”.

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If you would like more help, send “help”, or type ? to learn about Zulip’s keyboard shortcuts.

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Notes:

• We should have tests to make sure the list of advertised messages matches the messages the bot actually understands.
• It should be possible to manually determine the order of commands in the message (i.e. not just alphabetical).

Additional responses to user’s messages

In general, I think it’s helpful to be a bit flexible about the keywords, but I’m generally not too concerned about getting all the possible variants of what people type.

We should always ignore capitalization and formatting.

Apps

(also: app, applications, [any word] apps)

• You can download the mobile and desktop apps. Zulip also works great in a browser.

Edit profile

(also: profile)

• Go to [Profile settings](http://[org URL]/#settings/profile) to add a profile picture and edit your profile information.

Messages for “dark mode”, ”light mode”, “streams”, and “topics” will be specified in more detail once we have the initial framework.

Any messages not on the list

• I’m sorry, I did not understand your message. Please try one of the following commands: "apps”, “edit profile”, “dark mode”, ”light mode”, “streams”, and “topics”.

Other messages

We don’t want to spam with it all the time, but we may want to remind the user about the commands the bot know. Ideally, we should probably do this every time the last reminder scrolls off the screen. It would also be OK to do it every N messages (we should experiment to find a good N). This could be done as a follow-up after we have the initial version.

• Message (same as in the intro): Here are a few messages I understand: “apps”, “edit profile”, “dark mode”, ”light mode”, “streams”, and “topics”.

CZO discussion thread

[raghupalash]

Alright, I’m on it. Btw I didn’t touch the code that was related to organization setup, it was left as it is.

[raghupalash]

The PR is waiting for a review.