CONTENTS

SNo. Chapter Page No. 1 Chatbot and Dialogflow – An Overview 2

2 What is Dialogflow 3 – 5

3 Features of Dialogflow 6 – 9

4 Benefits of Dialogflow 10 - 11

5 Conclusion 12

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CHATBOTS AND DIALOGFLOW

AN OVERVIEW

As chatbots are gaining popularity day by day, the demand of chatbots development platforms is also rising. When you decide to delve into this exciting field of chatbots development, you will come across many platforms to assist you create your first chatbot application. The options are many and Dialogflow is one of them.

There are a number of Conversational AI and Conversational UI development environments available, to build what we will call a chatbot. To some of these environments the barrier to entry is quite high, to other again not so much. Lower barrier of entry might attract much attention initially, but then run into impediments when scaling. Dialogflow has seemingly a very low barrier of entry if we consider cost, ease of use and accessibility.

The other factor attracting users to Dialogflow is the desire to build interfaces on Google Assistant, Google Home and other Google related devices.

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WHAT IS DIALOGFLOW

Dialogflow erstwhile API.AI is Google-owned AI powered chatbot development framework which comes very handy to build a voice or text based bot. It’s a Machine Learning based natural language processor (NLP). Using Dialogflow we can provide delightful and natural conversational experiences to your customers. Dialogflow is Artificial Intelligence tool that enables the creation of applications for human-computer interaction.

Application developers are given the tools to enhance their app’s interaction features for their customers through AI-powered text and voice discussions.

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With Dialogflow’s help, developers can focus their time on other relevant parts of the creative process while the platform handles the standard protocols and functionalities requiring in-depth grammar rules. The applications you develop in the system use natural language processing. Dialogflow also features an in-line editor so that developers can write the code directly from the console.

Creating A New Project in Dialogflow — With A Simplified Menu on the Right

When looking at the cloud solutions available, Dialogflow is a very intuitive and fast way of getting started. One of the advantageous will be cost and ease of access.

Creating intents are straightforward, and the convergence of intents and entities are evident and necessary. Dialogflow’s auto detection of entities when entering user utterances is intuitive and detects the intent of the developer.

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The Integration points what Dialogflow refers to as fulfillment can be tricky, but we have the choice to create our own JSON based integration point or hosting it on Cloud Functions for Firebase. This is a convenient way of getting your chatbot, or conversational application out on Google Assistant, which facilitates access to a multitude of devices.

Dialogflow enables access to its APIs for clients to develop custom integrations.

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FEATURES OF DIALOGFLOW

Intents

Intents are basic building blocks of conversation in Dialogflow. Based upon voice/text input of users, Dialogflow selects best matching intent and replies back with response. And how does the matching process work? Using Training Phrases. In intent, you can define training phrases which will be matched with user inputs. As Dialogflow finds a matching training phrase, it will call upon corresponding intent and replies back to user with the response set in that intent.

Entities

Entities are Dialogflow’s mechanism for identifying and extracting useful data from natural language inputs. While intents allow your agent to understand the motivation behind a particular user input, entities are used to pick out specific pieces of information that your users mention. For example, in our Railway Buddy app, we defined Station Names as entities. So, whenever there was a station name included in the user input, we could identify it and use it to prepare response. Dialogflow offers some pre-built system entities too.

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Knowledge Base

This is currently in Beta version but it looks pretty promising. Knowledge base is kind of self learning system which takes FAQs or articles as input and prepares answers on its own. Isn’t it cool? You can give FAQ URL or upload an article in knowledge base and when user asks something, Dialogflow will find the matching response from FAQ/article and provide back to user. This will be game changing once the feature is matured.

Fulfillment

While intents are powerful way to prepare responses for the user, it might be able to handle all the responses. In cases, where responses are dynamic, you will need to fetch the data from your server. Fulfillment comes to your rescue for such scenarios. Dialogflow provides free of cost webhook integration to enable communication of your chatbot with your server. If you want to serve response from your database, then you can use webhook. Check our another blog post for detailed information about how to use webhook.

Integration

It offers integration with wide range of chat platforms like Google Assistant, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, Line, Viber, Skype, Twitter, Twilio, Kik, Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Alexa and Cisco Spark.

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It means that once you develop the chat agent, it can cater to your audience on different channels. Of course, there are some changes required to make the agent compatible with all these platforms, but the core conversation system stays intact. So, once your bot is developed on Dialogflow, with some modifications, it can be integrated on multiple platforms.

Analytics

Once your chatbot is live, you would be eager to know how your chatbot is performing. Analytics provide all the insights about usage of your bot. It helps you find more about user behavior so that you can improve your chatbot further.

In a snapshot the features of Dialogflow, can be listed as: o Small Talk o Multi-Lingual Agent Support o Cross Platform Support o Fulfillment o Training o Agent Creation & Management o Entities o Intents o Integrations o In-Line Code Editor

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BENEFITS OF DIALOGFLOW

1. Google Speech — one of the best Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems offered by Google.

2. Robust context based input recognition.

3. One bot can be integrated on multiple chat/messenger platforms.

4. Not only chat/messenger platforms, it also supports wearables and devices like Google Home and Amazon Alexa.

5. Free for normal use. The pricing depends upon the usage of the app as the usage increases.

6. Multiple languages are supported. Currently supported languages are English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai.

7. Webhook integration to communicate with your server. This is very important as you might not be able to setup all the responses from Dialogflow itself. In case you need to fetch data or prepare response from your server then you can easily do it using Webhook fulfilment.

8. Analytics — when it comes to provide statistics Google never disappoints you. You can have detailed analytics report of your app.

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9. Detailed error reporting. All the calls to your bots are logged so you can know how your users are using your app and what types of errors they are facing.

10. Easy import and export of chat agent.

11. Reliable Google infrastructure when you want to scale your apps to server millions of users.

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CONCLUSION

With Google’s Dialogflow, businesses can target and engage with their prospects or customers anywhere on any device.

However, a chatbot developer must be acquainted with the platform-specific SDKs to make the chatbot compatible with the particular web or mobile frameworks. As of now, Google extends its support for 17 technology platforms including Android, Cordova, Botkit, C++, iOS, Node.js, Python, to name a few.

Compared to other chatbots development platforms, Dialogflow has many advantages. Of course there are some limitations too, but it could be easily be number one choice for many types of chatbots development.

The Standard Edition of Dialogfow has no charge, but there are quotas involved, so some consideration will have to be given to expected volumes and how this might impact cost.

Managing the dialog will become complex and an issue, if you are using Dialogflow for Google Assistant it will suffice, and it is actually very convenient. However, the moment you start building more complex dialog structures, you will have to facilitate state management and context management to another environment.

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