Google Assistant Actions Builder

Google Assistant has taken a major step to revamp the Developer tools by introducing Actions Builder and Actions SDK

What is Actions Builder

Actions Builder is a web-based IDE that lets you develop, test, and deploy directly in the Actions console. The graphical interface lets you visualize the conversational flow, manage Natural Language Understanding (NLU) training data, and debug with advanced tools.

What you can expect from the new Actions Builder

The new Actions on Builder has no Dialogflow. Everything has been inbuilt inside the actions console itself.

Features like

Scenes
Slots
Types (similar to entities)
Create conversation inline no need to use Dialogflow anymore
Action SDK with AWS Lambda API Gateway HTTP proxy integration

Good to see the webhook handlers can be directly added to a scene by adding the handler name. (Need to see how it works in complex cases)

For every scene, there is a visual representation of how things will come in that is onEnter what should be done. As well as we can add conditions based on the user response and we can transit/move to another scene.

There are options like Types (Similar to entities in Dialogflow) as well as the options for custom intent handling

It would be great if we have an overall mapping of all scenes from MainInvocation

So far everything seems good but if we compare the new Actions Builder with Dialogflow we could see some of the features like

Knowledgebase connector
Implicit Invocation

are missing maybe they would have not updated in the docs will find it out soon.

What you can’t do with the new Action Builder

Using Dialogflow we would write conversations once and deploy it in multiple channels. But using the new Action Builder it can’t be done(Might get changed soon) Since the doors to Dialogflow from Google Assistant have been shut with the new Action Builder.

If an option is given to the user to choose either Dialogflow or the new Action Builder for development it would be great :)