Integrations

Recently, I realized that people are not always very clear about Dialogflow’s architecture. In particular, a client was mixing up fulfillment and integrations. So this article provides a high level overview of Dialogflow’s architecture with a focus on how data flows when users interact with Dialogflow agents. In my view, there are 4 concepts you need to understand to get a good picture of Dialogflow’s architecture. 1 Request-response You can summarize a Dialogflow agent as a series of (request, response) pairs [1] . That is, 1 User sends a request to the Dialogflow agent 2 (some NLU magic happens) 3 Dialogflow sends a response back to the user Why is this important? You see a lot of questions on forums…

In this tutorial, I explain how to integrate your Dialogflow bot with the Telegram chat app. Why I prefer Telegram when creating tutorials I usually prefer to use Telegram for creating tutorials and demos. There are a few reasons for this: The process of creating the bot inside Telegram is quick since you can do it by sending messages to a designated “BotFather” account Telegram has only a single access token, so the integration steps are fewer Telegram supports a few rich responses such as buttons Hyperlinks in the text response of Dialogflow are automatically converted to clickable links inside the Telegram chat window Telegram supports multiple responses per message (for example, the 1-click web demo doesn’t support this) How…

I recently got this question from a reader. We need help in creating a chatbot for one of our clients. ….. The main problem we have is the language that we need to use: (mentions a language not supported by Dialogflow). The second is that we would like it to work the same on: Facebook, WhatsApp and website. I wouldn’t recommend this. Rich controls The main reason for this is that you are not utilizing all the benefits you get from the UI across all the three channels. Specifically, you have rich controls in these channels which can improve your conversation flow in a few different ways. Speed up user input For example, you cannot have buttons inside your WhatsApp…

I got this question in my comments recently: This question got me thinking about building custom integrations versus using the built-in 1-click integrations in Dialogflow. I do understand that a lot of people choose Dialogflow mainly for its ability to do 1-click integration with multiple platforms. But my experience till date has been that almost always, you are better off building out a custom integration with Dialogflow. First, some definitions. What is a 1-click integration? These are the integrations you see on your Dialogflow console. Here is an example of a 1-click integration I built. (Sorry, I don’t have bandwidth to maintain it right now). What is a custom integration? When you build a custom integration, you will use Dialogflow’s…

Over the last few days, I received two separate user questions asking me why I don’t cover the Dialogflow + Facebook Messenger integration on my site. I wrote some thoughts previously about this, and here I will provide an update post-GDPR. This is obviously my opinion, so if you don’t like the conclusion I suggest you continue doing whatever you were planning to do and just imagine you never read this article. 🙂 Reasons why you think it is a good idea to build Messenger bots Clearly, there are some major factors why people choose to build FB Messenger Bots. Here are some of them: the audience is huge the reach is massive “everyone is on Facebook” Let us look…