Flow XO really gets it wrong

Flow XO is a weird one. It’s like it’s been designed by a programmer that thinks that designing bots is just like programming. Because it seems to be kind of a graphical programming language. This makes it somewhat powerful, but extremely unwieldy if you want to handle complex situations robustly.

The first thing you’ll notice about it are it’s flat design and bright colours. After signing up, it takes you through a somewhat helpful tutorial that tells you where all the bits are. Conceptually though, you’re left somewhat none the wiser, as there’s not really much instruction as to how you think about building a bot in Flow XO. The basic idea is that you define “flows” that describe sequences of possible conversation. For example, I might start by greeting someone with “Welcome to the Eatalot restaurant! What would you like to eat?” The user’s response can then be stored in an “attribute” (for programmers, a variable), and can be retrieved later on. Conditions can be applied to the sequence which could (for example) look at the value of an attribute set earlier. These filters provide the ability to build up complex logical expressions depending on these values.

My issue with this interface is that the designers have thought up a way by which you could build a bot, and encased it in an elegant user interface. However it’s not a way that I personally would ever want to build a bot. It would take forever to get anything that worked vaguely reliably, and I would effectively be programming using a graphical user interface. If I wanted to program, I would use a programming language.

Flow XO has the following pricing structure:

• The free plan allows up to 500 interactions, 5 bots, 2 weeks of logs and includes support.
• The standard plan at $19 a month allows up to 5,000 interactions, 15 bots, 3 months of logs and priority support.
• An additional 5 bots can be added for $10 a month and an additional 25,000 interactions can be added for $25 a month

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