Three types of Dialogflow contexts

You might not have realized this, but there are actually three types of Dialogflow contexts.

And I recommend only one of them.

Implicit and auto-generated contexts

When you use the slot filling feature, which I do not recommend, you are using implicit, auto-generated contexts. (Note: I use auto-generated and system generated interchangeably, they mean the same thing).

These contexts are auto-generated because you didn’t create them but they are automatically generated by the system when you define a parameter as being required.

They are implicit, because their presence cannot be used to infer candidate intents.

Explicit and auto-generated contexts

When you use the follow-up intents feature, you will notice that Dialogflow automatically adds an output context to the parent intent as well as an input context to the child intent.

They are auto-generated because you didn’t create them.

They are explicit, however, because the contexts used by the followup intents can be used to infer candidate intents.

Explicit and user-defined contexts

When you create your own contexts to design your conversation flow, I would call them explicit, user-defined contexts.

These are user-defined, of course, since you defined them.

They are explicit, since you can use these contexts to infer candidate intents.

The explicative approach

I recommend that people who build Dialogflow bots use the explicative approach since it makes it much easier to build maintainable Dialogflow bots.

So I suggest using explicit and user-defined contexts as much as possible, since it makes it much easier to debug your Dialogflow chatbot.