Hi there!

My response here is assuming you’re not looking to use a Front Chat channel, but rather you have an external chat app, and you want to use Front to allow humans to respond to your customers. 

What would be the best and fastest approach to use a custom chatbot in Front?

Using the Application Channel Messages API to send messages between the visitor and your existing bot-backend is probably your best approach. 

Do you have ideas on how to implement customer escalation from bot to human?

Something that should work is having a Front rule (or the API) apply a tag like “currently managed by bot”, and ensure everything with that tag remains archived, or in a separate inbox. Once the bot decides to hand off to a human, either remove that tag / move to the inbox monitored by humans so it can be handled.

My Front API doc reading suggests that using a custom channel to communicate the bot would work. What do you think of this approach?

Yes! That’s the approach we would recommend. 

Let us know if you have questions!