Webchat: Typing Indicator for Contacts
Sebis
Business Problem
As a business using respond.io's webchat, I need contacts to see a typing indicator when an agent or AI Agent is composing a reply — the same way it works on WhatsApp, TikTok, and Telegram.
Without it, contacts have no visual feedback after sending a message. They don't know if their message was received, seen, or being responded to — so they leave the website before a reply arrives.
Desired Outcome
• Show a typing indicator to the contact in webchat when an agent or AI Agent is composing a reply
Current Workaround
N/A
A
Alyaa See
Hi Sebis thanks for the request.
We’d like to understand better so we can evaluate properly - for example, what kind of conversations does this affect (sales, support etc), what’s difficult without it, and what you’d hope to improve by having a typing indicator in webchat?
This would help us in assessing your needs more accurately.
Sebis
Alyaa See Yes the situation is that when someone enters on our webchat and sends a message he is waiting for a reply but he leaves the website because he doesn't see if somenone is typing in the back.
He doesn't know if something is working in the back, if the message was sent, was seen and so on.
This increases the drop-off rate
If it had a typing indicator, the client will stay on webchat because he knows that he will get a reply.
Florian Barral
Alyaa See +1 on this! We're building an AI sales agent on Respond.io that handles orders via WhatsApp and Telegram. Our agent takes 5-15 seconds to process requests (product search, stock check, pricing), and during that time the customer has zero feedback that something is happening.
We currently send interim text messages ("Searching products...", "Processing your order...") as a workaround, but these clutter the conversation history and feel unnatural. And still the customer does not know if things are still going on.
What we'd need specifically:
- An API endpoint to trigger the typing indicator programmatically (e.g. POST /contact/{id}/typing), not just in the webchat UI
- Support for WhatsApp channels (has native typing indicator APIs)
This would be a huge improvement for AI agent use cases where processing time is non-trivial. Right now the lack of visual feedback makes it feel like the bot is unresponsive.
Honestly, if this isn't on the roadmap, we may have to integrate directly with the WhatsApp Business API (Meta Cloud API) which supports typing indicators natively — but we'd obviously prefer to keep everything through Respond.io. 🙂