Actions SDK installation in Ubuntu
Overview
Google Assistant team has introduced a suite of new and improved developer tools to create conversational actions. Today we will see how to install the new gactions CLI in Ubuntu
Objectives
What is Google Assistant
What’s new in developer tools
Features of Actions SDK
Installing gactions CLI for Ubuntu
CLI commands for Actions SDK
1. What is Google Assistant
Google Assistant is a personal voice assistant that offers a host of actions and integrations. From sending texts and setting reminders, to ordering coffee and playing music, the 1 million+ actions available suit a wide range of voice command needs.
2. What’s new in developer tools
The assistant team has introduced the two new developer tools
Actions Builder
Actions SDK
Actions Builder
Actions Builder is a web-based IDE that lets you develop, test, and deploy actions directly in the Actions console. The new builder lets you visualize the conversational flow, manage Natural Language Understanding (NLU) training data.
Actions SDK
For those of you who prefer local IDEs, the updated Actions SDK provides a file-based representation of your Actions project. This lets you author NLU training data and conversational flows locally as well as bulk import and export training data.
3. Features of Actions SDK
The new Actions SDK contains the following features
An open file-based representation of an Actions project
A command-line interface (CLI) — gactions
Webhooks and a Node.js fulfillment library
Open file-based representation of an Actions project
We can build our action invocation and conversation models with intents, types, scenes, and prompts.
Command-line interface (CLI)-gactions
The gactions tool provides a CLI to bootstrap and automates the development of your Actions. It lets you initialize standard Action project files, push updates to the Actions console, deploy projects.
Using the CLI we can perform the common workflows like importing existing projects or starting work on a feature branch using the source control system.
Webhooks and a Node.js fulfillment library
We can write our business logic to our business service using the webhooks. Some of the use cases of the fulfillment library are extracting parameters from a user query and generating a multimodal experience (voice only and voice and visuals) for Google Assistant.
4. Installing gactions CLI for ubuntu
Now we will install the gactions CLI for ubuntu. Download the installation package for gactions from here.
gactions installation package
Once the package is downloaded extract the files from the package and then open a terminal to check the file permission
file permission check
Now we will enable the execute permission in Linux like below
sudo chmod +x gactions
After entering the password permission will be enabled. Now we will move this file from the downloads folder to /usr/local/bin
To move the gactions file from the downloads folder to /usr/local/bin directory use the below command
sudo mv /download-folder-path/aog-cli/gactions /usr/local/bin
once the file is moved you can check whether the gactions is installed or not using the command
gactions help or gactions version
5. CLI commands for Actions SDK
For example, to pull a project from the web IDE to your local machine we would use the pull command like below
gactions pull --project-id my-project-id
To push or pull a project you should enable the Actions API
Note: You cannot create an actions project from your CLI
Resource Links
To know more about Actions SDK use the below links
gactions — Click here to view
Project Synchronization — Click here to view
Congratulations
You have learned how to install the new Actions SDK CLI in your local machine. I am excited to see what you are going to build on.
Happy Learning :)
