Deconstructing Chatbot: Integrate Dialogflow with Telephony Gateway
Introduction
In this article we will learn how Dialogflow integrates with Telephony Gateway. The Telephony Gateway feature provides a telephone interface to the Dialogflow agent. Although you can use any Dialoglfow agent and work through this article to create the integration, if you are following the Deconstructing chatbots series, you can use the same Agent that we created in previous labs “Appointment Scheduler”. We will finally test to see if the integration by sending the requests over chat.
What you’ll learn
- How to enable Telephony Gateway in Dialogflow
- How to test the Dialogflow agent with Telephony Gateway integration
Prerequisites
- Basic concepts and constructs of Dialogflow. For introductory Dialogflow tutorial videos that covers basic conversational design check out the Deconstructing chatbot series.
- We will be using the same Appointment Scheduler chatbot that we built in this article and build upon it to understand the Telephony Gateway integration.
- Also go through the “Deconstructing Chatbots: Integrate Dialogflow with Telephony Gateway” article as well.
What is Telephony Gateway Integration?
It is used to build conversational IVR (interactive voice response) solutions that integrate with the rest of your call center network. Currently (the service is in beta), you can select a telephone number hosted by Google. In the future, you will also be able to transfer an existing telephone number.
The biggest advantage of the telephony gateway is that you can create the agent for chat or messaging services and turn it into an IVR without much effort. You just assign a phone number to the chatbot that is already built and provide the same experience to users across the phone and web.
NOTE: Remember that this is a feature in beta, so these instructions might change as the services goes into GA. But the general idea remains the same.
Enable Telephony Gateway in Dialogflow
We will use the same appointment scheduler chatbot that we build in the previous lab and work through the integration.
- Navigate to the Dialogflow Console.
- Select the AppointmentScheduler agent that we created previously.
- Click on Integrations and then click on “Dialogflow Phone Gateway” integration settings.
- It allows you to select the country and the phone number and finish the selection.
- Once finished, the congratulations message indicates a phone number that is assigned to the agent for users to call in.
Test the Agent
In order to test the Dialogflow agent with this Telephone Gateway integration, place call to the number that was assigned in previous step navigate the prompts accordingly. If you used the Appointment scheduler agent for this integration, you will notice that you can set up appointment on the phone just like the chat.
Congratulations!
You enabled a Telephony Gateway for the existing Dialogflow agent and were able to create an IVR as a result!
Next steps
- Check out the Dialogflow website here for documentation, APIs, integrations and more.
- Follow Deconstructing Chatbots video series and subscribe to Google cloud platform youtube channel
- Want more stories? Check my Medium, follow me on twitter.
- Try Dialogflow, it is free to build a bot! Check it out.
