Getting Started With Action On Google

What is Action On Google (AOG)?

A new platform introduced by Google which help developers create actions which in turn extend’s functionality of the existing Google Assistant i.e Google’s Virtual Personal Assistant spread across 500 million devices including smart :

1. Mobile Phones
2. Watches
3. Cars
4. Speakers
5. Headphones etc

So now i know what is AOG all about and now i want to start with AOG. How can i start?

Before starting we should learn/know some of the important terms which will be essential as we start with AOG :

1. Action
2. Intent
3. Fulfillment

What is Action?

Action==Interaction

We as developers create interactions i.e conversations which will result in answering user queries and fulfilling user needs. For example :

1. Booking a appointment with service centre
2. Booking a table in restaurant and many more.

Actions which we create are embedded into Google Assistant and can be easily invoke by users using invocations defined for specific intents.

To Invoke your action user just need to say

“Hey Google, talk to Your_ Action”

What is Intent?

Intent==Goal

User can say anything while interacting with our action and we need to identify what user is trying to say or what exactly user want’s. In order to accomplish this we have concept of Intents in AOG.

Intents contains training phrases which user might say to our action while interacting with it. So we can have multiple intents depending upon the functionality of our Action. Whatever user says is matched with Intents which we created in our solution and if match is found then appropriate message/action is performed as defined.

Intent Types

1. Default Intents
2. Custom Intents

So whenever you create a Agent (if you are using Dialog-flow in AOG), there we will notice two default intents created which you can modified as per your requirement.

Defaults Intents are :

1. Default Welcome Intent
2. Default Fallback Intent

Default Welcome Intent : Contains a default welcome message for user’s using your actions, which you can customise and also added more utterances as training phrases in the intent.

Default Fallback Intent : Contains default fallback messages which will be displayed to users once our action is not able to find suitable intent that matches user queries/utterances. Again you can modify the response in this default fallback intent as well.

Custom Intents

Intents that we create to match user queries and show results (showing static messages or showing dynamic data via database/Api) by performing task in background if required.

3. Fulfillment

Its a feature which allow us to handle a intent and perform the corresponding action. We use this to interact with our server or execute some cloud function to get results as per user utterances and show the results back to user on Google Assistance interface.

This was a very brief introduction to AOG. I hope this is being useful to you. I will be publishing series of Articles on AOG in upcoming days. So keeping watching :-).

And its time for some networking now. Lets get connected, connect with me on :

LinkedIn , Google+, Twitter, Github, Facebook .

For more details do checkout the Official documentation at : Developers Google Actions

Cheers!!