Sendbird Chat - A complete chat API with moderation & translation

My main use case for Sendbird  is to develop chats on mobile development or mobile apps and also integrate that to our backend. I developed custom chats using Sendbird-like UI with Jetpack Compose on Android and used the custom views that it brings, including their own SDK.

I used Sendbird  for a chat for reporting orders. We had an app for buying things online and used Sendbird so customers could interact directly with a backend, with Sendbird portal or backend services where they could report whatever was going on with their order.

The best features Sendbird offers me is the ability to detect the state of a person, such as whether someone is online or has already replied or read the message. It is a way to be updated about how your messaging is going through status. Some applications or some SDK chats do not have enough information for getting the current status of the message that has been sent or the online activity of the end users, so that is something that is really valuable about Sendbird.

Having those status updates, such as knowing if someone is online or has read a message, helps my team and my users because sometimes if you do not see a status regarding a message, you feel you are not being talked to or reviewed. For example, if you send a message to some kind of chatbot and do not see activity feedback, such as the chat being online, the message being read, or somebody typing, that kind of thing makes the user feel more engaged. However, if you send messages and do not know whether that message was received or read, the user starts feeling as though they are not being given feedback or attention.

Sendbird is really valuable because I was able to create a chat from scratch in two to three days and a custom chat in a week by implementing things from scratch. I would say that is a really good tool or SDK to use if you are worried about speeding up and using standard behavior, because Sendbird brings almost all the features or functionality that any chat should have, such as group chat and direct chat.

For Sendbird to be improved, I would say creating more multi-platform SDKs is essential. People right now are working and do not care about the programming language itself. With AI-driven development happening, I would say include more AI-driven development or include more options on different libraries and languages.

I would appreciate keeping the documentation informed and getting more sample codes because I noticed that there were some samples that were not really up-to-date with the current development trends.

I have been using Sendbird since 2019, which is seven years.

5

I think everything is valuable and I have no other improvements to suggest.

My advice to others looking into using Sendbird is that they should try it because if you need to build a chat, Sendbird already has an option that behavior implemented, and you do not have to worry or lose time implementing from scratch.

Regarding Sendbird's AI capabilities, I think we need to consider how the information is being transported and what protocols we should implement so that AI cannot compromise the information security and integrity.

I think Sendbird's AI capabilities are really accurate. It has been predicting things as it is supposed to. It has cross-references and the answers are valuable. My overall rating for this review is ten out of ten.

My main use case for Sendbird  is to give chat functionality to our users and also a live stream feature in the app.

A specific example of how my users interact with the chat or live stream features in my app is that there is a chat tab. There's an activity tab within which there are two sections, one is alerts and the other is chat. Within that, I have slightly customized Sendbird  chat SDK and Sendbird UI SDK's components and used Sendbird chat's APIs. There are predefined groups that exist in the app and people are added by default to those groups. They can chat amongst themselves, and when they visit another user's profile, they can click on chat and chat with somebody. After that, that chat will appear in the list of chats in that section.

When the group organizer, also known as the play host, hosts an event, they have an option to run a live stream. People can join that live stream via a link, which is another use case of how I have used Sendbird in my app.

The best features Sendbird offers are reliable chats, emojis, and sharing files or audio messages, all of which are relatively easy to set up and use.

Emojis and file sharing features help my users or my team by allowing emojis to be used to react and message, and files definitely come in handy when somebody wants to share a photograph or something they want to show to the group or within one-on-one chats.

Sendbird has positively impacted my organization by giving the users of my product a feeling of community that we wanted to give, which has really increased the app usage time.

To improve Sendbird, my suggestion is to not launch products in Beta; live stream was launched in Beta. Their teams could be better in sync, as I had a very bad bug wherein all three SDKs had a problematic initialization order that required a bug fix version to be released after 17 email exchanges to finally  get them to agree that the fault was on their side, which was pretty painful.

I have been using Sendbird for at least one and a half years.

Sendbird is stable for the most part.

Sendbird's scalability is as expected; it is an enterprise level, good, and very scalable software.

The customer support for Sendbird is responsive.

My experience with customer support is that it's responsive, but sometimes the depth of technicality that I expect is lost. I faced that two times because I was using Sendbird chat SDK as well as Sendbird UI SDK and then later Sendbird live stream SDK, which caused a lot of problems, but there was always a response. However, the resolution to some problems that involved multiple SDKs came in a little later and required a lot of effort from my end to get the solution out.

Sendbird was the first solution I used.

I have seen a return on investment, as the general sense was that if it made our app users feel more like a community and the app engagement increases, the whole business gets a boost, which matters a lot even if it is difficult to directly quantify into a number.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing indicates that pricing was expensive, but Sendbird was kind enough to give us some discount initially, while overall it is an expensive product as compared to other peers.

Before choosing Sendbird, I evaluated two or three other options including Twilio , but I do not really remember details as it was almost one and a half years back; we thought Sendbird was the best choice because it is enterprise and stable.

My advice for others looking into using Sendbird is that if you want to use plug-and-play and do nothing, then you can definitely use Sendbird. If you have a little bit of budget, you can rely on the stability and scalability of Sendbird and customer support as well. However, if you are going with fully custom made components and want to customize from the ground up, it is better to read the documentation first, as while Sendbird can accommodate everything, they are lacking in the clarity of their documentation; it is very confusing with many versions present.

Regarding Sendbird's AI capabilities, I think the governance and security are fine, but we have not utilized Sendbird AI much, so I am not in a position to comment a lot on that.

We have not exploited Sendbird's AI capabilities too much in the last three to four months, so I do not have substantial feedback on its accuracy and reliability of output.

I would rate this review a seven out of ten.

My main use case for Sendbird  is to deploy it in customers' websites for the chatbot in their websites. We used a WordPress plugin majorly to enable it for customer websites.

A specific example of how a customer benefits from this chatbot integration is an e-commerce website customer who wanted it to be deployed on their website for questions related to their products and any issues. The chatbot was integrated so that initial queries could be answered by the LLM which was connected to their website. If customers needed further requests or assistance and the chatbot could not answer, a ticket would be created for them and email notifications could be triggered. However, the initial set of queries could be catered to by the chatbot.

We just used it for customer websites.

The best features Sendbird  offers include easy integration with WordPress websites. You can have your knowledge bases connected to it and automated customer service capabilities. It can answer common customer questions and queries.

Sendbird has positively impacted my organization because we do not have to build custom chatbots with code, and we could do no-code deployment, which is simply straightforward. Sendbird also provides an SDK which we have not used, but it is something which our organization is looking into. The no-code deployment has affected website launches in a timely manner.

On average, I save two weeks per project compared to building custom chatbots.

Sendbird can be improved by looking into the app ID and improvements on a daily basis.

I would add that they could incorporate more features such as enabling video integration so that we can provide video on the chatbot itself. Those additions could improve functionality and also integrating the ChatGPT model or cloud model would be beneficial.

I have been using Sendbird for over two years.

Regarding Sendbird's AI capabilities, I find its accuracy and reliability of output to be quite reliable because it commits to serving content from the PDFs and the knowledge base which becomes the LLM for the software. The chatbot availability is approximately 99% and even if some services are down, it does not affect the chatbot availability. The latency over the network does not affect the chatbot. Overall, it is quite accurate and reliable in output.

Regarding Sendbird's governance and security, they are quite good because it provides good audit logs and version control. Regarding management, we do have different user levels, which ensures that not every WordPress user could have access to chatbot removal or addition. Concerning its scalability, it has very good connection management which helps a large number of concurrent users to connect and use the chatbot and also helps to maintain traffic spikes. This is what makes it good in terms of governance and security.

I have seen a return on investment because I was the only person needed to deploy it instead of four people coding for the implementation, and they were charging for maintaining the connection.

I was using Mailchimp before Sendbird.

I rate Sendbird a ten on a scale of one to ten.

I give it a ten because it really leverages the use of AI with the LLM model which we could construct with the knowledge base PDFs and documentation which makes it a perfect bot. It caters to around seventy percent of the customer queries because it serves the purpose for which it is deployed. Until I go into the SDK things, I could find more areas of improvement, but at this moment, it is a ten. My overall review rating for Sendbird is ten out of ten.