What is a Chat API?
Have you ever wondered how you could build a scalable chat system in your products, while also reducing development time? Of course, you have. Many businesses today have opted for pre-built communication software, avoiding the need to develop their own chat system from the ground up. This ground-breaking cloud-based software is revolutionizing industries and customer engagement as it saves development time and cost.
This article aims to introduce you to Chat APIs, and their benefits to developers and enterprises.
What is a Chat API?
A chat API manages communication requests in the field of online communication and enables real-time messaging between two or more participants using a mobile, web application, or browser.
In the moment of digital transformation, chat APIs have proven to be quite useful to businesses and their users. Since developers can include conversational interfaces quickly for user interaction into their programs using a chat API, platforms have been able to launch faster, while promoting customer engagements, and online communities.
To access a pre-built chat API, a backend communication platform like Robin which offers real-time chat functionalities is simply integrated into your application, rather than you building from scratch.
API and SDK are not the same
Understanding the difference between an API and SDK is important when planning product strategies, given the fact that both are easily used interchangeably or might be mixed up by non-developers. While an SDK, Software Development Kit is a toolkit for creating applications and functionalities, APIs are used to communicate between various applications. Depending on the software's intended use, an SDK application might typically contain an API or even numerous APIs. Still, an API can also function on its own.
Similarly, SDKs can be pre-built as well to save development costs and time. In this case, the SDK will include a whole installable software kit, that provides necessary code samples, libraries, debuggers and features. Saving you the time you would have spent if you decided to build from scratch.
Benefits of Integrating a Chat API
There are many pros in integrating a ready-made chat API into your platform, besides the obvious reasons of saving development time and cost by not building from scratch. It gives businesses and developers an avenue to concentrate on other product aspects and improve user experiences. In addition, products can launch in a short time and by integrating with an API vendor like Robin, the pressure is off on developers and enterprises as they do not have to worry about support, updates, and maintenance.
