quickest-silver•2mo ago
Help With Parallel API Calls
Hi Voiceflow Friends,
I am looking for some help in doing parallel/background API calls.
What I mean by this... I am looking to make an API call, while continuing the flow to other steps for a user. At the moment if you make an API call, you have to wait for a response, which is not great for user experience. This would improve the user experience and mask slower latency.
The reason I am looking to do this is the API call may not be relevant to a user (e.g. internal notification) or a variable captured in the response will be used later in the flow but not straight away.
Looking forward to seeing your input 🙂 ,
Dan
3 Replies
VF doesn't support ASYNC calls (officially). I mean you can run multiple API requests in parallel in a function, but you can't have the flow continue while a request is processing in the background. Basically, a "Step" (API / Function) needs to be completed before the flow will continue.
With that said, there are workarounds. Are you a dev?
quickest-silverOP•2mo ago
Hi mate, yes I am a dev.
I had most automations in Make but for an online serving chatbot, I personally don't think this is great as the latency hinders user experience.
I've replicated all the automations in Python and have fixed the latency issue (the work around as Voiceflow doesn't support the ASYNC calls as you said).
I think it would be a really good feature for Voiceflow to have ASYNC calls, is that something that is going to be coming in the future?
You can easily get this done. DM me and I can walk you through it.