Enhance Customer Chat by Buffering Messages with Twilio and Redis

This n8n workflow demonstrates a simple approach to improve chat UX by staggering an AI Agent's reply for users who send in a sequence of partial messages and in short bursts.

How it works

• Twilio webhook receives user's messages which are recorded in a message stack powered by Redis.
• The execution is immediately paused for 5 seconds and then another check is done against the message stack for the latest message.
• The purpose of this check lets use know if the user is sending more messages or if they are waiting for a reply.
• The execution is aborted if the latest message on the stack differs from the incoming message and continues if they are the same.
• For the latter, the agent receives the buffered messages up to that point and is able to respond to them in a single reply.

Requirements

• A Twilio account and SMS-enabled phone number to receive messages.
• Redis instance for the messages stack.
• OpenAI account for the language model.

Customising the workflow

This workflow should work for other common messaging platforms such as Whatsapp and Telegram.

5 seconds too long or too short? Adjust the wait threshold to suit your customers.