VK

The whole process will be:

1. create community, get group id and access token

2. enable community messages and bot abilities

Get Group ID and Access Token

You need to have a VK personal account first, go to https://vk.com (opens new window), register and login yourself.

Go to "Community" from the left sidebar and "Create Community" for your chatbot.

You will find your group id in the URL (see above screenshot). Click on "API usage", let's create an access token.

Click on "Create token", UChat only need to access your community management and messages. Tick the options and hit "Create".

Copy your token and group id and now let's go back to UChat.

Go to VK channel, click "Add New Bot" and fill in your group id and access token, hit "Add".

Forgot your group id? You can find the community information page here:

After the connection, your page looks like this:

Click "Create Bot", select a template and done.

Add a simple greeting message for testing.

Enable Community Messages and Bot Abilities

To talk to your bot, you need to enable community messages first. Follow steps 1 to 4 in the above screenshot to do so.

Then go to "Bot settings", change the bot abilities to be "Enabled" and make sure you hit the "Save" button and see the green "Changes saved" prompted. It's important to enable bot abilities so that your bot can send buttons, questions and cards instead of just text messages and media.

Talk to Vk Bot

Now you can open your VK application on phone, search your community name and click on it:

Click on "Message" to start the conversation.

VK Limitation

There are several limitations on VK channel according to their API:

1. in a card, the image should have a 13/8 ratio and there should be at least one button otherwise the card won't show.

2. in a question step, there are 5 quick answers at most.

3. in a file question, the file uploaded by the user is sent to VK and VK return an URL pointing to the file back to UChat. Please note that this URL isn't a direct file link. Therefore you cannot send a file type message based on this URL. You can print the URL instead and by clicking this URL, users can access the file.