Zapier Power-up

Zapier power-up overview

The Zapier AI Action power-up allows you to integrate your bot with the thousands of services in the Zapier ecosystem!

The Chat Thing Zapier power-up allows you to trigger Zapier actions from within your conversations opening an an unimaginable number of use cases.

The best way to understand this power-up is to see it in action:

Example use-cases

Because there are over 5000 services on the Zapier platform the potential use-cases are almost endless, but here's a few to get your cogs turning:

• Meeting scheduler bot - Using the Google calendar action create a bot that can be used to schedule meetings on your behalf
• Lead gen Google sheets bot - Use the Google sheets integration to get your bot to collect leads and save them into Google sheets
• Stripe helper - Use the stripe integration to create a bot that can help you perform common tasks such as searching for a customer, finding invoices and more

Setup Zapier

Before you can use the Zapier AI power-ups you will need to create an account on Zapier.

Before you can use Zapier AI actions in Chat Thing you need to enable and configure them in Zapier.

Zapier AI actions are managed from their dedicated site found here: https://actions.zapier.com/

Creating a custom app and your first action

Before you can enable specific action you need to create a "Custom" app in the Zapier AI actions dashboard.

Click "My actions" in the sidebar or go here: https://actions.zapier.com/providers/.

Start the app creation process by clicking the link:

In the next screen that appears click the "Open action setup window"

This will open a new window asking you to allow Zapier AI actions access to your Zapier account. Click allow.

At this point the custom app has been created and you are now ready to start adding actions to your app!

Search for the action you would like to add, in this case we are going to add the "Slack: Send Channel Message" action so our bot can post to Slack.

Depending on the action you have chosen you may then be asked to connect your account. Follow the steps to connect your account, and then click the "Refresh" button to select the connected account.

Once the account is selected you will then be presented with options to configure the action. These will be specific to the action you have selected. In our example we can set values for the Slack channel we want to post to, and can even set the message. If we leave these blank AI will fill them in for us. You will also have the opportunity to set these in Chat Thing later.

If you are happy with the settings click the "Enable action" button to enable the action.

Enabling more actions in Zapier

You can add more actions to your custom app by heading to the connected apps section and clicking "Manage actions" to open the actions window.

From their you can click the "Add a new action" button to go through the process of adding another action.

Retrieving your Zapier API key

Before you can use the actions you have setup in Chat Thing, you will need to grab your API key. You can find this on the actions credential page Copy your API key as you will need it when setting up the power-up in Chat Thing.

Adding an new Zapier power-up in Chat Thing

Once you have setup your actions in Zapier its time to add them to your Chat Thing bot.

Head to the power-ups section of your bot settings, start to add a new power-up and choose the Zapier AI action power-up.

After creating the action you will see its settings screen. Its recommended you then take the following steps in order.

1. Add your Zapier API Key

Paste your Zapier API key from the actions credential page into the API key field. You will not be able to choose the action until you do this.

2. Choose your action

Next choose the action your want to add using the action selector. You should see all the actions you have enabled inside Zapier here.

After choosing an action Chat Thing will intelligently update your power-ups title and description to better reflect your chosen action. Feel free to change this further.

You will also notice the "Action Fields" section populating with the fields that are available for the bot to set when using the action.

3. Configure fields

You have the oppurtunity to configure how your bot will use the action fields. Take a look at the following example for configuring a Slack action.

Each field has four columns:

• Name - The name of the field
• Description - The description of what this field is used for. This is used by the bot to understand how it should use the field so is very important
• Value - You can fill in a value for each field to fix it to a certain value, or you can leave it blank to let it be filled in by the bot
• Ignore - Fields that aren't required can be ignored. This is useful if certain fields aren't useful for your purpose.

In the example above we have disabled the "Preview Only" field because we don't want the bot to use Zapier's action preview feature.

We have also added a value of "jozef-test" to the "Channel" field. This means that whenever the bot uses this action it will always post to the "jozef-test" channel. If we were to leave this blank the bot could decide, or ask which channel to post to.

Testing your action

Once you are happy with your action settings, make sure to save them and then its time to test. Talk to your bot and attempt to trigger the power-up.

Debugging Zapier power-ups

Sometimes your power-up might not work how you expect. The best way to figure out whats wrong is to expand the details when the power-up is used in your conversation.

You will see the fields the bot is using, and potentially any errors returned from Zapier.

After identifying the problem, maybe its a missing or incorrectly set field, you can adjust your bot system message, power-up description, or field descriptions to try and fix the issue.