The AI chatbot builder helps you to create your own AI chatbot for WhatsApp Business. Draw complex response flows, with events (eg. user sent message), actions (eg. send response message) and conditions (eg. check segment). With our no-code chatbot Builder, you can craft customized experiences on WhatsApp Business in little to no-time.

This guide goes into explaining how to drive automated conversations on WhatsApp Business. As an official WhatsApp Business Solution Provider, Crisp can provide you with the ability to connect WhatsApp Business to our AI chatbot software. No need to access to the Business API.

If you' re not an existing Crisp customer, creating a bot for WhatApp is 100% free for the time of your trial (which can go up to 30 days). Make sure to create an account before going through the tutorial.

➡️ Click here to create an account on Crisp.

What do I need to build an AI WhatsApp Business chatbot?

To build automated responses for WhatsApp Business, you'll need the following requirements:

• A WhatsApp Business Account Connected to Crisp
• The AI chatbot plugin
• A Crisp Account set as "Owner"
• Access to Crisp Essentials

Create an AI chatbot using WhatsApp Business

Now that you're ready to build a bot, let's get down to the creation process. For the sake of this tutorial, we're going to create a department routing bot that will require WhatsApp Business users to interact with buttons on which he can tap to be routed to the right department in your company.

1. Got to AI Automations and look for data sources

An AI is good when it is trained. Not training an AI would result in hiring a random man in the street and ask him to answer customer support inquiries straight away : it will result in poor quality answer and unsatisfied customers.

In this section, you can manage data sources. Data sources is the place where you can train your AI for WhatsApp Business. Your AI will uses all context data provided in data sources to generate more relevant responses to your customers and automate conversations.

Five kinds of data sources can be used, they all work together to generate better responses:

• Answer Snippets : write short Q&A (Questions & Answers) about common themes your customers frequently ask you. Those Q&A are solely used by your AI and are not visible by your users. This where you can enter all your custom and private data that you can't add through the other sources.
• Web Content : add all your Web domains, and we extract text from all your Web pages for you. We train the AI with the main textual content from your Web pages. If you have an online documentation, adding its domain can bring valuable of knowledge to your AI.
• Knowledge Base Articles : as you create articles on your Crisp Knowledge Base, we feed them to your AI to train them. Those articles will be visible by your users on your Crisp Knowledge Base and used by your AI to suggest helpful Knowledge Base articles in automated AI-generated responses.
• Inbox Messages : all messages sent by your human agents to your customers are used to train your MagicReply AI ( note that we do not use your Inbox Messages to generate automated AI answers to your users for privacy reasons, we only use them to suggest AI-generated answers by your human agents within the Crisp Inbox ).
• Data importer : As you store knowledge internally, such as in .txt files, pdf, or CSVs, you can now upload them into Crisp to power your AI with PDF, CSV or .txt files.

2. Go to AI Automations and look for the "AI Chatbot"

2. Click on "New Scenario" at the top right and select "Use a Sample Scenario". From there, choose "Department Bot".

3. Select the "User Message Matches" block and click on the Pen to edit the script behaviour.

4. In the Origins dropdown, hit "WhatsApp" so the bot triggers on messages coming from WhatsApp only."

5. Test the chatbot by sending a message from your WhatsApp personal account to the WhatsApp Business Account you linked with Crisp.

And voilà, you have created your first chatbot for WhatsApp. Now, you can take advantage of the numerous use-cases offered by Crisp.

Trigger an AI chatbot from a WhatsApp Message Template

It is possible to create message templates with buttons and you might want to use the bot to be triggered. It is helpful because it can keep the conversation going once a user selects a button from WhatsApp and the template itself. To do this, you will need to create a bot starting with a User Message Action event block.

The "Type" should be set to "Button Click" and under the "Match" drop down select "Use my own identifier". Then, in the match input field should be composed as such: {{button_value}}:{{template_name}} . You will need to replace the {{button_value}} with the text of the button and the {{template_name}} with the name of your template. Both the values should be in lowercase and you should replace any spaces with an underscore ( _ ).

For example, if you have a template called "Sample Issue Resolution" with two buttons "Yes"" and "No", your message match should look like this yes:sample_issue_resolution for when the button "Yes" is clicked and no:sample_issue_resolution for when the button "No" is clicked.

How to test the AI Chatbot before connecting to WhatsApp Business?

At that point, you're almost there. And it's vital you check how the bot behaves, and answers your key questions so you can refine AI's knowledge about your business.

The Scenario editor interface has an integrated menu to help you test your scenario directly, as covered earlier in this article. However, in some cases you may want to test it live if it contains advanced conditions, or if it is composed of several inter-connected individual scenarios.

A good way to test a scenario "live" without causing interference with your users, is to edit the terms detected by your initial "User sent a message" Event block, and to temporarily make it detect a term only known by you (like a password).

Going beyond with Crisp Chatbot Builder

Crisp AI chatbot builder offers a large number of possibilities for WhatsApp Business. For example, you could create an FAQ bot through WhatsApp, using Crisp Knowledge Base.

Note that you can connect Crisp with Instagram and Facebook Messenger so you have one scenario built for the 3 channels:

• Connect Crisp with WhatsApp Business Platform
• Connect Crisp with Instagram DMs
• Connect Crisp with Facebook Messenger

Want know more about Crisp Chatbot Builder? Click here to access a dedicated guide.

Updated on: 02/07/2025