I'm building a chatbot, using Twilio Autopilot, and the conversations keep timing out as our customers are not responding quickly enough. The conversation goes on for a while, and many users will respond over the course of days (rather than minutes)
The problem is that the Listen action in Autopilot times out after 4 hours. (https://www.twilio.com/docs/autopilot/actions/listen) - Fine for a quick 'make an appointment' type scenario - but less good for a longer conversation, esp in a messenger channel like SMS or WhatsApp.
Is there a way to extend the timeout? Alternatively, is there simply a way to re-establish conversation context once timed out (without having to re-ask questions)?
Twilio developer evangelist here.
I'm afraid there isn't any way to deal with this right now. The 4 hour limit is based on the original cookies we implemented for SMS and voice calls. While it would be nice to be able to set the length of that yourself, it's not something we support now.
To re-establish the conversation I can imagine doing so with a bit of work. You'd want to ensure you always store any answers in the memory of the bot but also in your own database. Then when a user replies outside of the conversation window you'd need to reload the answers from your own database, add them to the memory and redirect to the next question you need to ask. I don't think you could use collect for more than one question at a time working in this manner, but it might work for you.
Let me know what you think.