SMS conversational app

Innovating Amid COVID Times

Keyhole Software Articles, Conversational Apps, Keyhole Creations Leave a Comment

They say necessity is the mother of invention, and the pandemic has given us plenty of need for finding and innovating new ways of functioning. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted most aspects of modern-day work life, perhaps most notably, physical office spaces. Working from home has become the new norm and many offices, including ours, have few if any folks working from their physical locations.  

As things begin to reopen, many organizations will ask their staff to slowly transition from home back into the office. As Keyhole embarks on this transitioning process, our goal is to be as safe and responsible as possible. 

With almost 100 people on the Keyhole team, we have chosen to limit the number of folks allowed to work from our office at one time to continue to ensure the safety of our employees. 

In this post, we discuss how our SMS conversational texting platform, KHS {Convo}, has allowed us to manage our return to the office and how it could benefit your organization as well.

Keyhole Releases Open Source, React-Based Chat UI Component

Keyhole Software Articles, Company News, Conversational Apps, Keyhole Creations, React Leave a Comment

The Keyhole team is excited to announce the release of an open source UI chat component that can be embedded in applications. This UI Component is React-based and can be used for chatbot and chat-based user interfaces.

This component is stand alone. It has a configurable implementation to talk with any server-side API. This component abstracts away its data transport middleware and, in the absence of a consumer-provided implementation, emulates its own asynchronous reply….

How an SMS Application Took a Job (i.e. Task)

David Pitt Articles, Automation, Conversational Apps, JavaScript, Keyhole Creations Leave a Comment

This blog is about a human’s job being replaced by automation. But, before you start composing emails and social media responses, know that it’s a job that I think most folks would gladly allow an automated mechanism to take over.

The “job” discussed in this blog is the need to contact individual users (in this case, employees) when those users forgot to accomplish a required task.

In this blog, we discuss a conversational application solution used internally at Keyhole Software for automated SMS text messaging features surrounding time tracking. The solution, implemented with conversational application platform KHS {Convo}, allowed for time entries to be submitted via text and automated, schedule-based notifications….

Keyhole Labs Releases KHS {Convo} Under Open Source License

Lauren Fournier Articles, Company News, Conversational Apps, Keyhole Creations Leave a Comment

Keyhole Labs has announced its release of the KHS {Convo} conversational application development platform under an Apache 2.0 open source license. Development teams can now use and modify KHS {Convo} for their own uses (even commercially) using the open source platform.

KHS {Convo} is a Node.js based platform for creating SMS text message and web-based conversational experiences. It was created by our team at Keyhole Labs.

What’s a Conversational Application? A Conversational Application provides a messaging interface for a personalized conversation between your company and a user. The ad hoc interaction is designed to provide hyper-relevant & personalized content via automated SMS text messaging that doesn’t feel automated.

For more information, please visit…

A Conversation About Conversations

David Pitt Articles, Conversational Apps, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Keyhole Creations, Mobile, Node.js, React Leave a Comment

We created a platform that supports developing a “conversational” type application through SMS. The user experience between a user and an SMS application can be thought of as a conversation. A user texts a question or topic, and a reply is returned, then another question and reply is performed until a desired result is accomplished.

Now, this is not a universal user experience, but for many use cases it can provide an easy to deliver users functionality quickly and conveniently. There is no need to install or download apps, or pop open a browser and type in a URL; just have a conversation through your texting app.

In this blog: Why conversational applications are handy, examples of conversational applications we have created, and a walkthrough of the application architecture used to develop those SMS applications. Includes how to make texting a richer experience, state, and session handling insights.