While working on a chat flow in Webex Connect Standalone, I ran into something that at first looked like a bug in my logic, but turned out to be behavior tied to how the Receive node handles input events. Btw, the same problem may happen if you try to build a Webex Connect flow in Webex CC from scratch.
The expectation is simple: the Receive node should wait for a user to actually send a message, capture it, and pass it дальше through the flow. In practice, things didn’t behave that way during testing.
What I observed was that the Receive node was getting triggered even before the user pressed “send”. Just starting to type a message was enough. In some cases, the moment a spacebar was pressed, the node exited via its success path and passed along a message labeled as a typing indicator.
From the flow’s perspective, this looks like a valid input. But in reality, it’s not a completed user message - it’s just an event signaling that the user is typing.
In my setup, the Receive node sits inside a loop and feeds into a Scripted AI Agent node. The idea is straightforward: wait for input → send it to the AI → process the response → loop back.
Once the typing indicator started coming through as if it were a real message, the AI agent began receiving “typing indicator” as input. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t know how to handle that and started falling back to generic responses like it couldn’t understand the message. At that point, the conversation flow was effectively broken.
After checking with Cisco, this behavior was confirmed as a known issue related to typing_indicator events. The system treats typing activity as an event that can be emitted through the same channel, which means it can unintentionally hit the flow unless explicitly handled.
The practical workaround is to filter these events out. This is done by introducing a Branch node after the Receive node and checking whether the incoming payload corresponds to a typing indicator. If it does, the flow should simply loop back to the Receive node and wait again instead of continuing down the main path.
At first glance, that solves the problem - but another limitation shows up immediately. Flow Builder does not allow connecting the success path of a node directly back to the same Receive node. This is most likely a built-in safeguard to prevent infinite loops.
To get around this, an intermediate step is needed. In my case, a simple Evaluate node with a minimal JavaScript expression was enough to act as a pass-through. It doesn’t alter the data in any way, but it allows the loop to be formed without violating the builder’s constraints.
The connections are as follows:
- TYPING from the Branch goes to the Evaluate node;
- 1 from the Evaluate goes back to the Receive node.
Once this structure is in place, the flow behaves correctly again. Typing indicators are intercepted and discarded, only real user messages proceed to the AI agent, and the conversation loop remains stable without unintended triggers.
It’s one of those edge cases that isn’t obvious until you hit it in testing, but once understood, it becomes a small but important detail to account for when designing conversational flows in Webex Connect.
No comments:
Post a Comment