Hi Brian,

What are you trying to get at here? That the user/customer typed something before the bot kicked in? I think we are missing the context of your question to best assist you. If you're looking for a better way to do this. Turn on Conversation Auto Start, move your send response into your bot, and then have the bot prompt all at once. 

Also the first message a customer sends in is the variable of message.message.body. You pass what variable into your bot as a way to process intent selection in case they send something before all the messages render.