Customizing pauses between prompts

Give your chats a more realistic feel by customizing the duration of pauses between prompts.

By default, there is a pause of about a second between prompts. DialogForm allows you to customize this at various levels of granularity:

1. Set an account-wide default pause for all your flows and sequences

2. Set a default pause for a flow or sequence. This takes precedence over the account-wide value.

3. Set a pause for a prompt (or a step, in the case of multi-step prompts). This takes precedence over the above two values.

What To Do

Set up the preview panel

To be able to experience the pauses in the preview panel, you need to ensure your preview settings are correctly configured. In any DialogForm flow editor page, hover over the three vertical dots at the top right of the preview panel. Make sure the preview settings are as shown in the screenshot below.

Here's an explanation of the preview settings:

• Auto progress - When enabled, the preview chat will automatically move forward to the next prompt when no answer is required

• Quicken default pauses - When disabled, default pauses are quickened and only prompt-level (and prompt-step-level) pauses are honoured. When enabled, all pauses are honoured.

Set an account-wide default pause

In any DialogForm page, click on your account icon on the top right to open up a dropdown menu. Click on the area at the top of the menu, where it displays your name/email address, to open up your account settings popup. Set your desired pause duration and hit 'Save'.

If you want to revert to the 'system' value, i.e. the one that we provided, then simply click on the orange cross and hit 'Save'.

Set a default pause for a flow or sequence

In any DialogForm flow editor page, click on your account icon on the top right, click on 'Settings', set your desired pause duration and hit 'Save'.

For sequences, you will find the 'Settings' menu item on the sequence editor page (the page that lists all the flows in a sequence), rather than on the individual flow editor page.

If you want to revert to your account-wide value, then simply click on the orange cross and hit 'Save'.

Set a pause for a prompt

Note that this works only for prompts that require no answer from the user, i.e. prompts from which the chat moves on automatically to the next prompt.

The arrow in the screenshot below shows you how to recognize a prompt that requires no answer.

Open the prompt settings panel by double-clicking on the desired prompt's name (or by hovering over the icon that appears to the right of the prompt name). Then enter your pause value under the 'OTHER SETTINGS' section.

To fall back on the default value for the flow/sequence, simple delete the content of the input. The default value will then show up there as grayed-out text.

You will need to publish the flow for changes in prompt-level pauses to take effect.

Set a pause for a prompt step in a multi-step prompt

The arrow in the screenshot below shows you how to recognize a multi-step prompt.

Note that this works only for steps that require no answer from the user, i.e. steps from which the chat moves on automatically to the next step or prompt.

Go to the desired step and hover over the icon that appears on the right-hand side of the step. Then, in the menu that opens up as a result, click on the "hourglass" menu item.

Clicking on the hourglass menu item will insert an input box below the prompt message, where you can enter a pause value. To remove the pause value, simply delete the contents of the input box.

You will need to publish the flow for changes in step-level pauses to take effect.