Introducing: Dialogflow one-click integration

Today we are announcing a one-click Dialogflow integration . Dialogflow is a great tool by Google that allows technical teams to build conversational agents. It is really powerful, but not easy to pick up. After today, all of our users will be able to transfer their designs to Dialogflow.

Don’t feel like reading? Check out this brief demo video. Otherwise just keep scrolling!

This feature answers the question: Now that my design is finalized, how do I proceed? The answer is that you will need to redesign it frequently once you are in production, as any domain expert will tell you. So the best way is to connect your design tool — Botsociety — with your favorite bot building platform. We started with Dialogflow because we really like it!

I will use a Google Home design in this post, but this integration works with any platform we support: Facebook Messenger, Slack, Alexa and Google Home!

How does the Dialogflow integration work?

First, you can design your conversational agent. As you may know, if you already use Botsociety, you are completely free in this phase. There is no need to define logical connections or backend instructions. This is because you really need to define the use case. You may need approval for a potential customer, or you may need to share it with your colleagues. If you are looking for tutorials on this topic, we have plenty!

Now, let’s assume that your design is finalized. You will see something like this:

Click on the button in the top right corner marked as “Build”. It will give you access to the building mode. Building mode shows you all the messages of your conversation in a compact way. This is that it looks like:

A couple of things happening here:

• Botsociety makes a guess and divides your design in different intents. You can adjust and rename the intent by clicking on their name
• You can define variables by selecting one or more word and typing the name of the variable.

With variable, I refer to the part of the conversation that is dynamic. So for example, if in the design process you added a message like the following:

Then, in the building mode, you can mark “John” as a variable named first_name

Following this idea, I marked my Pizzabot as follows:

In practice:

• I marked the pizza chosen by the user “Cheese pizza” as a variable of type custom named “pizza_type”
• I marked “650 California Street” as a variable of type system named “address”
• I renamed the intent (optional)

Now I’m done! I just need to go into Dialogflow, grab my developer key, paste it into Botsociety and boom. I have a working bot on Dialogflow! I can now refine it, for example by adding more training examples.

What are your plans?

We will continue to work on this integration and more in the future. We also want to allow our users to import back from bot building platforms like Dialogflow. The import back will allow for a continuous redesign of your agents, based on real usage data and experience. We are selecting beta testers for this second phase, so if you are interested, let us know in the comments!

You can try Botsociety here