New Integration: WhatsApp

We’re extremely excited to welcome a new integration to Uncanny Automator: WhatsApp. Our team had been working on this integration for months, but it was finally made possible only because of a new WhatsApp Cloud API that has now resolved some growing pains. With those challenges behind us, let’s dig deeper into what we were able to deliver in the free Uncanny Automator 4.4 release.

WhatsApp Integration

If you’re a WhatsApp user, you may be familiar with some of the other WhatsApp plugins already available for WordPress. Some of them even have hundreds of thousands of installs. What they all have in common is that they’re chat apps; they allow individual communication via WhatsApp, but they aren’t suitable for notifications and transactional messages. That’s where our integration comes in, as it uses the brand new WhatsApp Cloud API to facilitate for more advanced integrations.

The Uncanny Automator 4.4 release adds these new triggers for WhatsApp:

A message is received
A message to a recipient is not delivered because they have not opted in
A message to a recipient is set to a specific status
A message to a recipient was not delivered

And, of course, the actions that will undoubtedly see the most use:

Send a WhatsApp message template to a number
Send a WhatsApp message to a number

With these new additions, you can send email follow-ups if WhatsApp recipients fail validation, send notifications to users based on site activity, welcome new users to a social group with a personalized greeting, etc. Using message templates, you can take things even further with reusable content. Here’s a screenshot of the action:

As you can see, it’s extremely customizable and powerful.

But what makes Uncanny Automator really different than every other provider we’ve seen with API support is that we don’t add fees or surcharges for WhatsApp API use. You just pay for your WhatsApp account, nothing extra to us. In fact, the first 1,000 “conversations” are free each month, so if your site doesn’t send many messages, you might find yourself paying nothing for the WhatsApp integration. That means there is no cheaper option out there than Uncanny Automator if you send a lot of WhatsApp transactional messages.

Connecting your WordPress site to WhatsApp seamlessly does require a few steps, including creating a Business app with Facebook and connecting that app to WhatsApp and Uncanny Automator. Make sure you follow the steps in our Knowledge Base article to get the WhatsApp WordPress integration successfully set up.

Other new additions

As this 4.4 release falls outside of our normal release cycle (we just couldn’t wait to get WhatsApp out as soon as the new Cloud API was ready!), we don’t have many extra announcements, but we do have one that’s pretty cool. We made a big (well, subtle, but useful!) change to how field labels are presented in recipes.

Suppose you have an action to mark a topic complete for a user, and another to mark a course complete. After creating the recipe, the only way to tell them apart is with the title of the post, since selecting something hides the course and topic identifiers. Here’s an example: