WhatsApp Outbound Reply Messages
WhatsApp Outbound Replies allow businesses to quote/reply to an existing message in a conversation. This could be either an end user's message or their own message. This gives the business the ability to provide additional context when sending a message, in order to add clarity which the message content alone may not be able to convey.
Businesses can quote/reply to:
- An end user's message. This could be used in order to make it clear that the latest message sent by the business relates to a specific message from the user earlier in the conversation, e.g. "In reference to what you asked here, the answer is..."
- A message sent by the business. This could be used to refer to something the business themselves said earlier in the conversation e.g. "This is the option I was referring to"
Within the WhatsApp UI, the recipient will receive the new message along with a contextual bubble that displays the previous message's content.
API Request Payload
To send an Outbound Reply message, as well as the standard fields for the WhatsApp message type being sent, the JSON payload for the API request needs to include a top-level context property. The value of this property is an object with one property message_uuid, the value of which is the UUID of the message being quoted/replied to.
An example JSON payload might look something like this:
Limitations
- This feature is available on Cloud API hosted WABAs only (see WhatsApp Number Hosting)
- Replies must be made within 24 hours of the original message being quoted/replied to being received/sent.
Potential Errors
Attempts to reply to a message that is not stored, either because it does not exist or the 24h time limit has passed, will result in the message being rejected with the following error code:
1451 - Invalid context - the reference to the original message could not be found because it is invalid or no longer available