I got this question via my Drift bot. This article isn’t an answer to the question. Rather, it describes a general approach for what you should do if the specific feature you are looking for isn’t available in the client library of the programming language you are using. In other words, this article gives you an answer to the question: “How to do X using Dialogflow client library for NodeJS / C# / Python / Ruby / Go / Java / PHP”? Dialogflow Client Libraries From what I can see, there is a small problem with Dialogflow Client libraries as of this writing. They don’t always work as you might expect 🙂 That is, you are actually far better off […]

I have created a new course on Dialogflow’s REST API v2. In my view, this course will teach you pretty much everything you need to know to work with Dialogflow REST API v2. You can check it out here. (The coupon is a launch discount and is valid until end of day Nov 7th UTC time). Topics covered in the course include: different types of OAuth2 authentication how the three legged auth flow works how the service account flow works (this is what we use for Dialogflow) why use client libraries OAuth2 playground basics REST API v2 URL structure Google IAM primer Using Postman for exploring Dialogflow and other Google APIs Why you need to learn about Dialogflow middleware v1 […]

I got a question from a reader: Can I use a client side JavaScript app built using Ionic with Dialogflow’s v2 REST API? It could have also been Angular, or React, or one of the other bajillion other JavaScript frameworks. 🙂 The answer to all of you: No! The workaround You need to use the concept of Dialogflow REST API middleware 1 The middleware code runs on a server 2 You need to use a server side programming language such as NodeJS 3 You will save the service account JSON file to the server folder where your code is located (or some other folder you can access from the code) 4 You will set up a ‘relay’ between your JS app […]

If you are building complex integrations for Dialogflow, odds are you need to build custom Dialogflow middleware. Custom Dialogflow middleware Let us first understand what I mean by custom Dialogflow middleware. What is custom Dialogflow middleware? Here is an example of what I mean. The 1-click web demo integration of Dialogflow doesn’t support a lot of stuff. So you can build your own custom Dialogflow middleware to get around this. This is what the middleware does in this particular use case: take the user’s message relay the message to Dialogflow using the REST API get the response from Dialogflow’s REST API process the response to provide the appropriate result Here is a little flow diagram explaining this: As an example, […]

Since there have been a few people who have asked me about this, here is the official announcement on the Dialogflow website. If you have been following my site for a while, you know that I recommended moving to the v2 API a few months back. Custom website chatbots I think this change will heavily impact those who have built custom website chatbots. The main reason is that v2 uses Google’s OAuth2 for its authentication, while you could simply use the client access token for the v1 API. In turn, this leads to a significant extra effort to create website chatbots for API v2. I would recommend everyone who is still thinking of building out custom website chatbots to do […]

I recently received this question on my YouTube channel: There are a few issues to consider in what seems like a pretty simple question. How much automation does Dialogflow really support when it comes to the creation of an entire chatbot? You first need to create an agent inside Dialogflow So, the first thing is, the very first step of the process – clicking on “Create New Agent” so you can create an agent, can only be done within Dialogflow. While there are REST API methods to create intents, entities and contexts, there is no API call to create a new agent entirely from scratch. There probably is a good reason for this, but I am not sure what it […]