Dialogflow CX Basics — Part 1

If you don’t have time to read the entire article and want to know the core of this post. Find the quick read 👇

In this part, we will see the most important concepts in DialogflowCX 👇

Let’s start exploring the DialogflowCX concepts

1. Agents

• Dialogflow translates end-user text or audio during a conversation to structured data that our apps and services can understand.

• A Dialogflow agent is similar to a human call-center agent where we would train both and the training doesn’t need to be explicit

The following data is associated with Agent

Agent Data

2. Flows

Flows are used to design topics and the associated conversational paths. Every flow has a default start flow(It is enough for a simple agent) but for complicated agents, we are in need of flows

E.g: A ticket booking agent might require UserInformation Flow, Payment Flow, and Confirmation Flow It is similar to sub-agents in Dialogflow ES

3. Pages

• A Dialogflow conversation can be described and visualized as a state machine. The states of a CX session are represented by Pages

• For each Flow, we can have an “n” number of pages

• By default, each flow will have one page and only one page can be the current page. The current page is considered as Active

We can configure each page to collect information from the end-user

4. Entity Types

Entity types are used to control how data from end-user is extracted.CX entity types are similar to ES entity types.

Dialogflow CX supports

• System-entities

• Custom-entities

5. Parameters

Parameters are used to capture and reference values that have been supplied by the end-user during a session. Unlike raw end-user input, parameters are structured data that can easily be used to perform some logic or generate responses.

CX Parameters are similar to ES Parameters but the utility and scope has been expanded

6. Forms

DialogflowCX forms are similar to ES slot-filling which collects the list of parameters from end-user from a page.

The agent interacts with the end-user for multiple conversations turns, until it has collected all of the required form parameters, which are also known as page parameters. For each form parameter, you also provide prompts that the agent uses to request that information from the end-user. This process is called form filling.

7. Intents

An intent categorizes an end-user’s intention for one conversation turn. Compared to ES intents, CX intents have been simplified to make them a more reusable resource.

Intent contains Training Phrase and Parameters

• Training Phrases — Example phrase what end-user might type or say known as end-user input, When end-user phrases match with any of the training phrases then the intent is invoked.

• Parameters — To extract values from specific parts of the end-user inputs

Congratulations 🏆

You have completed the first part of DialogflowCX basics. In the next part, we will explore the other basic concepts till then Happy Learning 😄