How do you ensure people add your bot to Google Chat rooms?

Question

We have a bot on Google Chat but it seems people use it in the personal scope rather than adding to rooms. As per my understanding, there is no concept of "teams" on Google Chat. However, our bot works best with teams, ie, in rooms.

Is there a way to ensure bot is added to rooms? Also, to other bot developers out there - have you managed to replicate the success of Slack/MS Teams bots to Google Chat?

Thanks

Answer 1

There is no way to "force" users to use your bot in this way.

The best you could do is to detect whether the bot is in a private conversation and notify the user that it is useful as a "room" bot, not a "personal" bot. That and make sure your bot is well documented with the relevant info in hard-to-miss places.

You could do this by examining the event object which has this attribute:

space | object (Space) | The room or DM in which the event occurred.

Docs

• Event Object - where you might find info related to where the bot was called from.
• General Guides - for general info.