Articles

Today on the Dialogflow forum I answered this very question. Here is the answer, in one screenshot: Share feature Interestingly, the Share feature has been around for nearly 4 months. I wrote about it when it was released. Funnily enough, when thinking of the title back then, I actually used the suggestions at the bottom of the Google search results to choose a title 🙂 But looking back, I could have just used a more conversational title. In case it doesn’t work One of the annoying things about this feature is that it doesn’t actually send an email notification to the person you just added (???). You need to send them an email to tell them you have added them….

I have been writing a series of articles based on some of the common knowledge gaps I see in the clients that I help out with coaching. One of these knowledge gaps is that they don’t know about the Prebuilt SmallTalk agent.

To be very clear, this article is not about web design. I am not a web designer, or for that matter a designer of any sorts. I am a DialogFlow trainer/coach/consultant, and I am writing this article after a few attempts to create a web based chatbot based on DialogFlow. You can see plenty of articles on this broad topic on this site, and this article is a proposal based on my learnings till date. (And it will probably be a bit opinionated) My first chatbot The very first chatbot I built with DialogFlow was a sports stats chatbot for getting records about the sport of cricket. It is actually a chatbot with high utility value (by which I mean,…

In a recent coaching call, a client of mine had some difficulty capturing names using the @sys.given-name entity. In fact, the name which he tried and which failed, was mine 🙂 He replaced the name with @sys.any and was able to capture the name. So he got curious: why not just use @sys.any everywhere? It is not a good idea, and this article will describe why.

Update Dec 10th 2018: Template mode is now deprecated Recently, I was showing a coaching client how to use the template mode to capture a person’s name. I walked this client through how to switch to template mode, and how to use the @ symbol. Then I showed how adding a couple of letters after the @ symbol would bring up an autocomplete. That is, the fact that the autocomplete popped up on the screen was an easy way to figure out whether you are in example mode or in template mode (see below for example). As I explained this, he went Oh, so that’s what it is! I always wondered how they got that autocomplete thing to show up…

One of the nicest things about the new inline webhook editor in DialogFlow is that it allows people who create tutorials to make tightly focused ones instead of wrestling with getting their webhooks deployed. The problem A little while back I wrote a post about getting the user’s complete birthdate in DialogFlow. Turns out, the issue is somewhat non-trivial. Since DialogFlow will accept a date with only a month and a day (e.g. March 15th) as a valid input for the @sys.date entity, the user may not enter a year. The real issue, of course, is that DialogFlow will automatically append the current year as the year in the entered date. This is actually not missing information, but it is…