Cloud Messaging API and Its Benefits

Your company needs to create a chatbot or add messenger to its existing software. You've been chosen to bear this responsibility. The responsibility of either building an in-house solution or trusting an API provider. The right pick may save you a lot of time and improve your products, or vice versa.

For this very reason, we have compiled major benefits of trusting in Amio when it comes to messaging. We hope that the following list will help you to make the right choice.

Let's get started!

1. One API, multiple messengers

Having one API for multiple platforms brings you significant savings in development time. You will implement 1 API and will rule to many messengers, SMS, and a webchat. You will study only 1 documentation and use only 1 protocol (REST over HTTP).

Even if you start with one platform, another might be requested soon as there are still new ones coming out. Apple Business Chat or RCS to name just a few.

2. Less maintenance

Maintenance is very underrated. Messaging platforms are ever evolving. Time to time, new features appear or the API and its policies change. We are constantly monitoring these APIs. Whenever a change happens, we usually update Amio without our users even realizing it. We're very rarely pushed to make a breaking change ourselves.

3. Documentation

An API is only as good as its documentation. We keep our documentation simple, concise and up-to-date. It will give a kick to your development speed. Have a look at our docs.

If you decide to run the in-house API anyway, you should maintain your own documentation. The teams will be very grateful for having a great experience using it.

4. Cost savings

You don't like paying for a cloud API when you can do it by yourself? Better check twice all the things you will need to do. It's usually more work than it seems at first glance.

If you feel like the in-house messaging API makes sense for you, try to make rough calculations of monthly costs. The equation should cover the time of developers, servers, and databases and … you know, and so on. :)

With Amio, you can start for free and upgrade to higher plans on the go.

5. Faster time-to-market

Wherever possible, we're reducing the unnecessary administration to a minimum. A good example is Facebook Messenger. Getting a chatbot to production without Amio means to:

• create and set up your Facebook app
• get approval from Facebook (it can take several days or even weeks)
• implement Facebook SDK to connect your Facebook page

It's a lot of work and plenty of time. With Amio, it's a matter of seconds as reported on ProductHunt.

6. Developer-first approach

Amio is a tool for developers, not managers. We are developers ourselves. We understand how important is to work with the best tools to ship great products. Consequently, we put a lot of effort to make implementation of messengers a breeze.

Apart from API and documentation, we're adding other tools to make development smoother. You can use SDKs. Or download Amio Postman collections — they're great for rapid prototyping. Or try our chatbot builder library where you just add states and their transitions.

7. Error handling

Error handling capabilities of a system are usually overlooked. A good error handling can save you plenty of time and a ton of troubles. We want you to think about your business cases, not about how things should work.

If you don't receive a webhook, open Amio logs and see if your server is accessible or not.

If you send a request and it's wrong, the response explains where exactly and how to correct the error. The error will look alike:

{  
   rejected_value: "link",
   field: "content.payload[0].buttons[2].type",
   message: "Property 'type' with value 'link' does not match any
             allowed value: url, phone, postback."
}


8. Support

We are listening to the needs of our customers. If you're in trouble, we strive to help you. In case you're missing a meaningful feature, we'll try our best to incorporate it. Check out our GitHub where Amio users can report bugs and feature requests.

9. Quality assurance

Every feature we release in Amio API is completely covered by end-to-end tests. It helps us reveal our own bugs before they make it to production.

We run all the tests on a periodical basis to track changes in the underlying platforms. As said above, if a change appears, we usually update Amio without our users even realizing it.

Amio infrastructure is prepared for fast and zero-downtime deploys. If a bug really makes it to production, we can ship a fix quickly.

10. Integrations

We are tightly integrating with services that are in direct synergy with messengers and chats. Yet again, it saves you the precious time. Currently, we have integrated these projects:

• NLP  — Wit.ai and IBM Watson
• Statistics — Botanalytics

11. Centralized configuration

Every platform has its own administration and configuration. In most cases, you can just use Amio administration to configure all the platforms you need.

You've just finished reading about the benefits Amio can give you. Whether you're a helpdesk provider or a startup, you'll want to use all resources possible to improve your apps. Amio will cover your back with messengers, chats and, SMS so that you can focus solely on your business.

If you have more questions or feedbacks, email us on support@amio.io.

Amio Team