New in Smooch this month: carousel support for Viber; pre-filled message copy for mobile SDKs; a new blog series featuring our customers and the amazing products they’re building on Smooch; and a few tweaks and updates to our APIs & SDKs.

What’s new 🎉

Carousel support for Viber

Already supported on Facebook Messenger, LINE, Telegram and all our SDKs, carousels are now also supported by Smooch on Viber. Easily send a set of horizontally scrollable items that combines text, image and message actions via our Post Message API. Check out our Viber guide to learn more about how Smooch supports carousels on Viber.

Get the conversation going with pre-filled message copy

Help users start conversations with businesses by providing them with pre-filled copy when they open the chat window. Easily configure what copy should display and when to show it depending on your use case. For example, you could configure different pre-filled messages depending on where users are coming from and what they did in the app. This new feature is currently available in our iOS SDK 6.10.0 and Android SDK 5.13.0 and will be coming this summer in our Web SDK.

Customer Spotlight 🌟 ProNavigator

Can chatbots make the insurance industry more human? That’s the bet that ProNavigator is making, a Canadian startup that’s building an AI-powered “conversation engine” to make the experience of buying insurance faster and more convenient.

For most of us, shopping for home or car insurance is a tedious process, filled with never-ending forms, repetitive phone calls and a nagging sense that things could be a lot simpler.

Thanks to ProNavigator, whose bots are deployed on its customers’ websites and chat apps via Smooch, forward-looking insurance companies and brokers are generating more leads and engaging more customers. Read on to learn how ProNavigator is bringing the insurance industry into the 21st century.

This is our first post in a blog series looking at how innovative brands and bot makers are using Smooch to make the dream of conversational commerce into a reality.

Other API & SDK updates ⚙

• Upload Attachment API: Using the Upload Attachment API, you can now instruct Smooch to automatically delete attachments when the message containing them is deleted.
• Energy consumption on mobile SDKs: We’ve optimized our server-side websocket connection handling to improve energy consumption for our iOS and Android SDKs.
• Web Messenger updates: v4.12.5 included a fix for syncing messages across multiple browser sessions and a fix for iframes that would not load correctly in some browsers. We resolved a connection problem when downgrading to alternative transport when websockets are unavailable in v4.12.7. We fixed a Faye reconnection delay when a browser goes back online in v4.12.8. Finally, we’ve fixed a bug that prevented auto scrolling from working properly in v4.12.9.