Chatbots and other AI-based chatting interfaces are in huge demand these days in almost every sector. Often times we use Google Assistant or Siri or Cortana to boost up our daily processes; consequently they can be perceived as the benchmark of chatbots these days. They are smart, fast, flexible, and humans feel very engaged and comfortable when using them.

But what about building them? It takes a lot of effort to build chatbots like these because the core of these chatbots lies in Natural Language Processing (or NLP) which is an AI mechanism for building chatbots. Luckily, Google has made this challenge easier for devs with their platform  Dialogflow.

Dialogflow is a cloud-based service by Google which gives us the ability to build highly scalable chatbot interfaces with ease. Dialogflow works on the core of NLP and makes it very easy for developers to build and deploy a scalable chatbot solution. We can build our chatbots by training them in our training phrases and customized responses. Dialogflow is a cloud service so you will have to pay some amount after a specific usage cap has been met.

Now, after building a chatbot model in Dialogflow, the platform itself provides a lot of solutions to integrate that with numerous platforms like Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Actions on Google, etc. We can even integrate that chatbot with our web or mobile or desktop applications.

I hope you’ll create a Dialogflow bot prior to learning to integrate. On the other hand, if you’re not familiar with the core concepts of Dialogflow then I would like to suggest you read more about it  here.

Now that you know about the Dialogflow basics and your agent/bot is ready, let’s dive right into the integration part. You can create an agent for any use-case. I’ve created a burger ordering bot that will take the preferences from the user and accordingly order a burger from him or her. The name of my bot is “TheDevBurger” (the “Dev” stands for developer).

#chatbots #javascript #react #dialogflow