Posted by Mary Chen, Product Marketing Manager, and Ralfi Nahmias, Product Manager, Dialogflow
Today at Google Cloud Next '18, Dialogflow is introducing several new beta features to expand conversational capabilities for customer support and contact centers. Let's take a look at how three of these features can be used with the Google Assistant to improve the customer care experience for your Actions.
Building conversational Actions for content-heavy use cases, such as FAQ or knowledge base answers, is difficult. Such content is often dense and unstructured, making accurate intent modeling time-consuming and prone to error. Dialogflow's Knowledge Connectors feature simplifies the development process by understanding and automatically curating questions and responses from the content you provide. It can add thousands of extracted responses directly to your conversational Action built with Dialogflow, giving you more time for the fun parts – building rich and engaging user experiences.
Try out Knowledge Connectors in this bike shop sample
When users interact with the Google Assistant through text, it's common and natural to make spelling and grammar mistakes. When mistypes occur, Actions may not understand the user's intent, resulting in a poor followup experience. With Dialogflow's Automatic Spelling Correction, Actions built with Dialogflow can automatically correct spelling mistakes, which significantly improves intent and entity matching. Automatic Spelling Correction uses similar technology to what's used in Google Search and other Google products.
Enable Automatic Spelling Correction to improve intent and entity matching
Your Action can now be used as a virtual phone agent with Dialogflow's new Phone Gateway integration. Assign a working phone number to your Action built with Dialogflow, and it can start taking calls immediately. Phone Gateway allows you to easily implement virtual agents without needing to stitch together multiple services required for building phone applications.
Set up Phone Gateway in 3 easy steps
Dialogflow's Knowledge Connectors, Automatic Spelling Correction, and Phone Gateway are free for Standard Edition agents up to certain limits; for enterprise needs, see here for more options.
We look forward to the Actions you'll build with these new Dialogflow features. Give the features a try with the Cloud Next FAQ Action we made:
And if you're new to developing for the Google Assistant, join our Cloud Next talk this Thursday at 9am – see you on the livestream or in person!
Voice interaction has the potential to simplify the way we use technology. And with Dialogflow, Actions on Google, and Speech Synthesis API, it's becoming easier for any developer to create voice-based experiences. That's why we've created Voice Experiments, a site to showcase how developers are exploring voice interaction in all kinds of exciting new ways.
The site includes a few experiments that show how voice interaction can be used to explore music, gaming, storytelling, and more. MixLab makes it easier for anyone to create music, using simple voice commands. Mystery Animal puts a new spin on a classic game. And Story Speaker lets you create interactive, spoken stories by just writing in a Google Doc – no coding required.
You can try the experiments through the Google Assistant on your phone and on voice-activated speakers like the Google Home. Or you can try them on the web using a browser like Chrome.
It's still early days for voice interaction, and we're excited to see what you will make. Visit g.co/VoiceExperiments to play with the experiments or submit your own.
When we started API.AI, our goal was to provide developers like you with an API to add natural language processing capabilities to your applications, services and devices. We've worked hard towards that goal and accomplished a lot partnering with all of you. But as we've taken a look at our work over the past year and where we're heading, from new features like our Analytics tool to the 33 prebuilt agents, we realized that we were doing so much more than just providing an API. So with that, we'd like to introduce Dialogflow – the new name for API.AI.
Our new name doesn't change the work we're doing with you or our mission. Our mission continues to be that Dialogflow is your end-to-end platform for building great conversational experiences and our team will help you share what you've built with millions of users. In fact, here are 2 new features we've just launched to help you build those great experiences:
Thanks for being a part of API.AI – we can't wait to see what we do together with Dialogflow. Head over to your developer console and give these new features a try. And, as always, contact us if you have any questions.
