Can a community use google assistant to list a community events calendar? Ok Google what is happening in my community today? or OK Google what is happening at the city park this weekend?
I have seen many links to how to point google assistant to my own personal calendar, but no way to say use google sheet as the data for the communities upcoming events.
The short answer is no.
You cannot just update a spreadsheet and have the Google Assistant give community events based on this change, any more than you can do so and have Google Search give community events directly in response to a search.
Although Google is increasingly scraping websites, particularly AMP enabled websites, for direct answers to questions, this isn't the sort of question that they're currently indexing for. So there is no way to guarantee that the information is currently indexed to answer a question such as this.
However...
You can certainly create an Action using the Actions on Google SDK that can read a spreadsheet to answer community questions. This is the equivalent of your community setting up a website that people would go visit to see the community calendar, and residents could look things up by invoking the "Town of Wherever" Action with a phrase such as "Hey Google, ask Town of Wherever what is happening in the park".
Building such an Action would require you to write a webhook that accepts JSON from the Assistant, lookup the information you want using the Sheets API or something similar, and then returning JSON with the response.
Related
I am currently making a Watson Assistant in which I need to store data collected in a database. I am trying to do this by calling an endpoint I have created that will insert data into my database, however I do not know how I can use webhooks in my action skills.
The documentation has an overview of where and how webhooks are supported by Watson Assistant. Action skills only offer pre / post message hooks. When you compare an Action skill with a Dialog skill, Action skills are simpler to get started with, but Dialog skills offer all the features. What you are looking for is available for dialog nodes in Dialog skills.
Actions Skill is still quite new compared to Dialog Skill, and we have a lot of really exciting plans for Actions that will be coming out over time. The ability to call out to external systems is being totally revamped, at least compared to Dialog/webhooks, to be much easier to use and scale across your business. It's one of our top priorities for the future but will take some time to release. I can't give a date now but if you need this for your production assistant, as data_henrik said we recommend you use the Dialog skill
I have a Google Nest Hub Max and I want to increase its capabilities for a custom need:
"Hey Google, add xyz to my work planning"
Then I want to make an HTTP call to my private server
The private server returns a text
The text is displayed in the Google Nest Hub Max screen + speak-out.
How can that be achieved?
Originally I thought that this will not be difficult. I've imagined a NodeJs, Java, Python or whatever framework where Google gives me the xyz text and I can do my thing and return a simple text. And obviously, Google will handle the intent matching and only call my custom code when users say the precise phrase.
I've tried to search for how to do it online, but there is a lot of documentation everywhere. This post resumes quite well the situation, but I've never found a tutorial or hello world example of such a thing.
Does anyone know how to do it?
For steps 2. and 3., I don't necessarily need to use a private server, if I can achieve what the private server does inside the Smart Home Action code, mostly some basic Python code.
First - you're on the right track! There are a few assumptions and terminology issues in your question that we need to clear up first, but your idea is fundamentally sound:
Google uses the term "Smart Home Actions" to describe controlling IoT/smart home devices such as lights, appliances, outlets, etc. Making something that you control through the Assistant, including Smart Speakers and Smart Hubs, means building a Conversational Action.
Most Conversational Actions need to be invoked by name. So you would start your action with something like "Talk to Work Planning" or "Ask Work Planning to add XYZ'. There are a limited, but growing, number of built in intents (BIIs) to cover other verticals - but don't count on them right now.
All Actions are public. They all share an invocation name namespace and anyone can access them. You can add Account Linking or other ways to ensure a limited audience, and there are ways to have more private alpha and beta testing, but there are issues with both. (Consider this an opportunity!)
You're correct that Google will help you with parsing the Intent and getting the parameter values (the XYZ in your example) and then handing this over to your server. However, the server must be at a publicly accessible address with an HTTPS endpoint. (Google refers to this as a webhook.)
There are a number of resources available, via Google, StackOverflow, and elsewhere:
On StackOverflow, look for the actions-on-google tag. Frequently, conversational actions are either built with dialogflow-es or, more recently, actions-builder which each have their own tags. (And don't forget that when you post your own questions to make sure you provide code, errors, screen shots, and as much other information as you can to help us help you overcome the issues.)
Google's documentation about how to design and build conversational actions.
Google also has codelabs and sample code illustrating how to build conversational actions. The codelabs include the "hello world" examples you are probably looking for.
Most sample code uses JavaScript with node.js, since Google provides a library for it. If you want to use python, you'll need the JSON format that the Assistant will send to your webhook and that it expects back in response.
There are articles and videos written about it. For example, this series of blog posts discussing designing and developing actions outlines the steps and shows the code. And this YouTube playlist takes you through the process step-by-step (and there are other videos covering other details if you want more).
I have the following use case:
The user starts a chat and selects options (something like a tree), in some cases an administrator can enter the chat and give a response.
My question is: are chatbot systems useful in this case?
I have no experience in chatbot but all the examples that I find on the internet are about NLP.
I appreciate if you can recommend an open source library
I think Dialogflow is a pretty good one to create chatbots. It is free and using custom payloads (tree with options, buttons, chips, etc.). You can make them say some repeated stuff. You would have to type instead.
I have a video where I create a simple chatbot that can take data stored in google sheets and send that details to a user if he asks for the details. If you are interested, please check it out!
Also, here is the Dialogflow console link.
I know that DialogFlow can be trained for particular entities. But I wanted an insight on whether or not Google Assistant can understand my entities?
I've tried to search on official site but could not get clear understanding on whether or not I need to go for dialogflow.
Actions on Google will allow you to extend Google Assistant by writing your own app (i.e. an Action). In your Action, you can tailor conversational experience between the Google Assistant and a user. To write an action you will need to have a natural language understanding mechanism, which is what Dialogflow provides.
You can learn more about Actions on Google development in the official docs. There are also official informational talks about Actions on Google and Dialogflow online, such as
"An introduction to developing Actions for the Google Assistant (Google I/O '18)"
I'm not quite sure what you mean with your last sentence, there is no way to define entities for Google Assistant other than Dialogflow. Regarding your question, there is indeed no information on how entities are handled and how good one can reasonably expect the recognition to be. This is especially frustrating for the automated expension feature, where it is basically a lottery which values will be picked up and which will not. Extensive testing is really the only thing one can do there.
We need to display meta information (e.g, address, name) on our site for various venues like bars, restaurants, and theaters.
Ideally, users would type in the name of a venue, along with zip code, and we present the closest matches.
Which APIs have people used for similar geolocation purposes? What are the pros and cons of each?
Our basic research yielded a few options (listed in title and below). We're curious to hear how others have deployed these APIs and which ones are ultimately in use.
Fwix API: http://developers.fwix.com/
Zumigo
Does Facebook plan on offering a Places API eventually that could accomplish this?
Thanks!
Facebook Places is based on Factual. You can use Factual's API which is pretty good (and still free, I think?)
http://www.factual.com/topic/local
You can also use unauthenticated Foursquare as a straight places database. The data is of uneven quality since it's crowdsourced, but I find it generally good. It's free to a certain API limit, but I think the paid tier is negotiated.
https://developer.foursquare.com/
I briefly looked at Google Places but didn't like it because of all the restrictions on how you have to display results (Google wants their ad revenue).
It's been a long time since this question was asked but a quick update on answers for other people.
This post, right now at least, will not go into great detail about each service but merely lists them:
http://wiki.developer.factual.com/w/page/12298852/start
http://developer.yp.com
http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation
https://developer.foursquare.com/
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/
https://simplegeo.com/docs/api-endpoints/simplegeo-context
http://www.citygridmedia.com/developer/
http://fwix.com/developer_tools
http://localeze.com/
They each have their pros and cons (i.e. Google Places only allows 20 results per query, Foursquare and Facebook Places have semi-unreliable results) which can be explained a bit more in detail, although not entirely, in the following link. http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-each-Places-API
For my own project I ended up deciding to go with Factual's API since there are no restrictions on what you do with the data (one of the only ToS' that I've read in its entirety). Factual has a pretty reliable API, which as a user of the API you may update, modify, or flag rows of the data. Facebook Places bases their data on Factual's, just another fact to shed some perspective.
Hope I can be of help to any future searchers.
This is not a complete answer, because I havn't compared the given geolocation API, but there is also the Google Places API, which solves a similiar problem like the other APIs.
One thing about SimpleGeo: The Location API of SimpleGeo supports mainly US (and Canada?) based locations. The last time I checked, my home country Germany doesn't has many known locations.
Comparison between places data APIs is tough to keep up to date, with the fast past of the space, and with acquisitions like SimpleGeo and HyperPublic changing the landscape quickly.
So I'll just throw in CityGrids perspective as of February 2012. CityGrid provides 18M US places, allowing up to 10M requests per month for developers (publishers) at no charge.
You can search using a wide range of "what" and "where" (Cities, Neighborhoods, Zip Codes, Metro Areas, Addresses, Intersections) searches including latlong. We have rich data for each place including images, videos, reviews, offers, etc.
CityGrid also has a developer revenue sharing program where we'll pay you to display some places as well as large mobile and web advertising network.
You can also query Places via the CityGrid API using Factual, Foursquare and other places providers places and venue IDs. We aggregate data from several places data providers through our system.
Website: http://developer.citygridmedia.com/