What can you even build in just one hour?
With a little bit of planning, quite a lot.
The one hour Prototyping session I had was fantastic. Aravind took my flow charted concept and turned it into a rudimentary prototype that we were able to extend together during our session. (Full testimonial at end of the page)
Besides, my experience with clients tells me that there are at least a few people who are building bots which can be prototyped quickly, but they take a lot of time because they don't follow a structured process when it comes to learning and applying Dialogflow.
By utilizing the Dialogflow Prototype service, you can speed up the learning and the bot development process because I can help you avoid the common Dialogflow mistakes, which can sometimes cost you weeks of development effort.
How it works
1 Sign up (it is free and takes less than a minute) on my course website
2 Book the call below
3 I will enroll you into the Dialogflow Flowcharts and the Flowchart to Chatbot courses.
4 You should spend about an hour going through the courses and create the flowchart for your chatbot.
Note that if you are building a pure FAQ chatbot, don’t choose this service. Instead, please take a look at my service for automatically generating FAQ bots from your dataset.
5 Make sure you send me the XMind flowchart for your bot at least 24 hours before our call, as well as a brief description of what you would like to build (please read what Steven mentions in his testimonial on this topic)
6 During the call, we build the bot together
7 If you need to create a webhook, we will use Airtable. You can take a look at this tutorial and try and prepare the data in Airtable before the call.
8 No integrations. I can give you a quick explanation on how you can do the integration, but I cannot do the actual integration with for e.g. a website, or with FB Messenger etc. We will do all our work within the Dialogflow console, which has a simulator.
9 You can reschedule the appointment up to 15 days from original date of the appointment if you are not ready, but if you reschedule to a further date I will cancel your appointment and enroll you into the Dialogflow Toolkit.
My Guarantee
The Prototype Bot service even comes with a guarantee!
What if we cannot build the bot successfully inside the hour?
If we cannot build the bot within the stipulated time, I will enroll you for no extra cost into the Dialogflow Toolkit course bundle. (That is, for the amount you pay for the prototype bot service, you will also get the Dialogflow Toolkit course bundle).
And what if we do build the bot successfully in an hour?
On the other hand, if we build the bot successfully inside the 1 hour [1], you can then purchase the Dialogflow Toolkit for only $100 more. [2]
In other words, if the experiment fails, you get a $50 discount on the Dialogflow Toolkit, plus learnt a lot about how to build Dialogflow bots.
If the experiment succeeds, you have a working Dialogflow prototype bot, plus you get access to the Dialogflow Toolkit for only little more than what you would pay for the Toolkit bundle alone.
So from your perspective, it is a very low risk - especially if you are already considering purchasing the Dialogflow Toolkit bundle. If you are on a tight budget and you just want to explore if it is possible to build a Dialogflow chatbot for your use case, this will be a very quick and pretty inexpensive way to find out.
[1] You might have noticed that while I call it a 1-hour Dialogflow prototype service, we both have to spend more time than that on preparation. However, you can compare it with how long a typical project would take for you, and you will see that in terms of time spent, this is a really efficient process. [2] If it works, you agree to give me a testimonial for the 1 hour prototype consultation call before I give you access to the course bundle.The PayPal payment link is not working
In some cases, I may be able to arrange for alternate payment options. Reply back to the student signup confirmation email you received when you signed up for my course website with more details about your issue.
If you hadn’t provided some good quality tutorials for free I wouldn’t have booked the Prototype Bot Service.
(As a result of booking this service) I ended with a well functioning prototype that I could now extend myself into a fully functioning chat bot. I liked that I was able to get feedback and suggestions on my initial flow design.
1) The flow charting workflow is very helpful. The fact that you’ve taken the time to research a variety of different programs saved me a lot of time. Without your tutorial I would have resorted to using Visio or Google Sketch-up.
2) Being able to bounce ideas off of a person is very knowledge on chat bots is invaluable. This is still a very new space and most of the tutorials I’ve seen are overly simple and don’t really go into the depth required to build a use able product.
3) Getting feedback early on about challenges I will face as I develop my bot further. This is very useful for me to understand what the accuracy and limitations are of technology at this time. It would be very discouraging to spend a lot of time try to build certain features only to learn that the technology isn’t quite there yet.
For anybody looking to build a chat bot I highly recommend Aravind, his tutorials and his Prototype Bot Service. The one hour Prototyping session I had was fantastic. Aravind took my flow charted concept and turned it into a rudimentary prototype that we were able to extend together during our session. He provided me a lot of advice and suggestions around what I needed to do to fully build out the prototype and move it into the beta phase. This simple one hour session has saved me from going down a design path that would have ultimately failed and cost me many dozens of hours of wasted development time.
To get the most out of the Prototype session be sure you put in the proper amount of effort and preparation. Take the time to learn the workflow/concepts he presents in his flowcharting tutorial. (This workflow is far superior to the approach suggested in the official DialogFlow documentation.) Using Aravind’s flowcharting approach you’ll be amazed at how quickly a functional prototype can be put together.
The web connection and audio/video quality for the session were excellent. The tools for setting up the video conference were all easy to use.
– Steven L, August 2019
What if I don't want just a prototype but want to build a full bot?
As a big believer in building quick MVPs (Minimum Viable Products), my suggestion would still be to try and build a prototype if only to see how far you can go with your existing idea, before committing to a bigger budget.