New Dialogflow features: how to use them to expand your Actions’ customer support capabilities

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.

Create Actions smarter and faster with Knowledge Connectors Beta

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

Understand user texts better with Automatic Spelling Correction

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

Assign a phone number to your Action with Phone Gateway Beta

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:

  • Download the Github sample
  • Say "Hey Google, talk to Next helper" on your Google Assistant-enabled device
  • Call +1 317-978-0364 (which uses Dialogflow's Phone Gateway)

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!