Dialogflow CX

Till end of March 2021, you can get my Learn Dialogflow CX course for free by doing the following: 1 Buy the Learn Dialogflow ES course bundle 2 Provide a testimonial for one of the courses in the ES bundle 3 I will enroll you into the CX course for free The reason I am making this offer is because at the moment, I would prefer that only people who already understand ES fairly well buy the CX course. This was prompted by a student who purchased the CX course and sent in this refund request within a few days: Hi, I managed to review a few videos and realized I needed a lot more spadework. I ended up getting…

I got this question on my YouTube channel: I have a question about the context equivalent in CX. In ES, there was a concept of contexts. How can we achieve the same in CX? I tried one way with using condition routes with page transitions and it worked in a way. But are there other ways? First of all, the approach mentioned by the reader is correct. But it isn’t the full picture. There are some things you can do in CX which aren’t really possible in ES. For example, the concept of session variables is built into CX, so there is no need to explicitly declare a context for that in your CX chatbot. Similarly, fallbacks don’t push your…

Recently, someone asked me a question about Actions Builder on YouTube. The specific question isn’t very relevant, but I want to add my thoughts on this topic, and on voice bots in general. I don’t use the Actions Builder, and I am going to wait for a while before using it. Here is why: It is pretty clear that Actions Builder is inspired by Dialogflow CX. However, Actions Builder isn’t as powerful as Dialogflow CX. Will there be a built in integration between Dialogflow CX and Actions on Google? Now, technically, you can already combine the Actions SDK and use Dialogflow CX to power the NLU for your Google action. That’s a fairly laborious process though. However, I am waiting…

Now that Dialogflow CX has become generally available, it is time to revisit my article Dialogflow CX vs ES: First look. I recently released a course on Dialogflow CX. Based on all the stuff that I noticed, here is my updated comparison. CX makes it easier to handle conversations which go off track In Dialogflow ES, managing conversations which went off track required lots of effort and wasn’t very easy to manage even after putting in the effort. Since Dialogflow CX is based on a conversation state machine, when the conversation goes off track, it is like a self-loop back to the same state. (see diagram) If you understand how state machines work, this means there is really nothing extra…

First published: Sep 2020 The article was written when Dialogflow CX was still in Beta, and the video below was recorded after Dialogflow CX came out of beta. Video Timestamps [00:00] Who should watch this video?[00:46] 5 ways Dialogflow CX is better than Dialogflow ES[10:00] Should you get started with Dialogflow CX right away?[12:55] When to definitely use Dialogflow CX[14:35] When to definitely avoid Dialogflow CX[17:35] When to consider using Dialogflow CX[20:15] Dialogflow CX Course Discount Resources mentioned in the video Step by Step guide to Dialogflow 5 ways Dialogflow CX is better than Dialogflow ES When to definitely use Dialogflow CX When to definitely avoid Dialogflow CX When to consider using Dialogflow CX Flowchart to Chatbot course If you…

Recently, Dialogflow CX went out of Beta and became generally available. Since the issues I raised before (no History, few built in integrations, existing integrations don’t work as well as ES, knowledge connectors do not work etc) are still not fixed, this seems mostly an attempt to release it out the door ASAP. On the other hand, under the hood, I suppose the primitives used in CX are very solid. Either way, this update means that you should start learning CX if you haven’t already done so. It has some really significant improvements over ES when it comes to constructing complex conversations.

This article is intended to be a (reasonably) up-to-date list of features which are available in Dialogflow ES directly or easily via third party integrations, and which aren’t yet available in Dialogflow CX. Since Dialogflow CX is being improved continuously, I expect to slowly see many if not all of these items removed from this article over time. If and when that happens, I will keep striking out the old information and add a small note on what changed. While I will do my best to keep this exhaustive, there are clearly some features in ES almost no one uses. So I might not know if that feature went away in CX. If you know of such a feature, please…

A reader recently asked me if Dialogflow CX supports the Dialogflow Messenger integration. Answer: It doesn’t. Update : Now it does support Dialogflow Messenger. Most of the other 1-click integrations from Dialogflow ES are still not available. But more importantly, CX supports almost no integrations out of the box. I think it is important to understand why that might be the case. Unlike ES, there is no free tier in CX I wrote about this in my article comparing Dialogflow ES and CX, and while my initial pricing calculation was off by quite a bit (and was duly corrected by a commenter), the main point is that there is no free tier in CX as of this writing. (There is…