I want to use Dialogflow fulfillment to connect to an external webservice / API. One way of doing that is to use the custom webhook feature (not the inline web hook). However, when using the custom web hook it seems that you are limited to creating just one even though you may have many intents and you may want to call many endpoints. Is there a way to link to more custom webhooks (API endpoints)?
If you can only set up one web hook then your webserivce will always receive a Post request from Dialogflow and will then need to interpret the body of the request i.e. based on the intent parameter. Just wondering is there a better way to work with REST webservices with Dialogflow.
The other potential option is to use the inline web hook and then put logic in there to call specific endpoints, however, that might get a bit messy.
You can only setup one fulfillment that will handle the processing for all the Intents you've enabled. This can be either the built-in one through the fulfillment editor or at a webhook URL you specify.
That webhook is expected to delegate the actual processing to an Intent Handler of some sort. The Dialogflow node.js fulfillment library has a way to register what handler you want for each Intent name, or you can switch on the Intent name, the Action name, or any other field provided to you in your code.
In the library, you'll typically make the REST calls from an appropriate Intent handler which will take the parameters provided and craft the call. If you are using Javascript, make sure you are handling the call asynchronously and return a Promise.
I recommend a webhook because it gives you more control than the inline editor does. The inline editor is really just a webhook under the covers using Firebase Cloud Functions. Even putting it yourself in a Cloud Function gives you better control over it.
There may be costs depending where you host it, however Firebase has a free tier that is sufficient for testing and light operation. Once your Action is published, you are also eligible for a monthly cloud credit from Google.
Related
I want to make a simple post request in google actions to a self hosted web server and I cant seem to figure out how to do that. I cant find much in the documentation and I dont have access to inline cloud functions either.
What you're looking for is sometimes known as a webhook or a handler or handling fulfillment in the documentation.
You'll configure the overall Action with a single webhook URL. For specific Intents (in Dialogflow) or as part of a Handler when in a scene in Action Builder, you can specify when the webhook should be called. It will be called with a JSON body that is specific to Actions on Google (and differs if you're using Action Builder or Dialogflow) and expects a JSON response in a specific format.
For details about all of this, consult the documentation for webhooks in either Action Builder or Dialogflow.
I want to know about webhook (what is webhook). What is the application of webhook (a real world scenario). Besides, what are the differences between webhook & API?
An API is a standardised way of communicating with a service. You've tagged REST in your question so I'll focus on RESTful APIs using HTTP but it is important to know that API is a very generic term.
In the REST world everything is a resource and you use the HTTP methods to define what action you want to take on or apply to that resource. For example, to list all the users on GitHub you would send a GET request to https://api.github.com/users. The URL (specifically the /users part) defines what resource you are interested in. Here the resource is a collection of all the users. There's other methods you can use; such as PUT to create or update a resource. To learn more about the different methods you can read the HTTP specification.
Webhooks are often used in conjunction with APIs but they are focused on events. They allow a service to send out 'notifications' when an event happens or some condition is met.
GitHub is again a good example of what webhooks are used for. Say I'm building a service which sends out an email every time someone leaves a comment on an issue in GitHub. I could use the GitHub API (like above) to list all of the comments on an issue and then check if there have been any new comments since the last time I checked. I can then just repeat this request every few seconds. This is known as polling. The issue here is that most of the time I'm checking the result is not going to change. This is going to be a waste of resources.
Webooks allow for Event-Driven Programming. Instead of randomly checking I can instruct GitHub to send my service a HTTP request every time a comment is added: aka a webhook. In this architecture I only have to send a request to GitHub's API when I know for sure that a new comment has been left.
Overall, you cannot really compare APIs and webhooks. The link between them is simply that webhooks send requests to APIs.
Is there an API exposed for Actions on Google, similar to what Dialogflow offers with their API? The only API-like flow I have found through my research is this webhook flow API, but that only deals with conversation requests, prompts, and responses, which I have already handled.
Ideally I'd like to be able to dynamically create "agents" and their conversation flows without having to use the AoG console, similar to what Amazon offers with Alexa SMAPI.
There's not a full API to do everything that you want end-to-end. Some parts, like Dialogflow and fulfillment, can be automated, but it will still require some manual work in the Actions Console.
I had a conversation with another developer on this subject once. As a workaround, which is admittedly hacky, they decided to use the Puppeteer library to programmatically control a browser instance to fill in fields and click buttons.
That may not necessarily work when the console changes, and isn't a good substitute for an API, but it may work for you.
Yes you can do it using Google Dialogflow REST API
Here are APIs for the agent :
There are many more APIs available for different operations.
I am trying to forward Google Smart Home events to my Dialogflow fulfillment service. I am creating 3 intents with no input or output contexts set, no training phases and with the following events:
action_devices_SYNC
action_devices_EXECUTE
action_devices_QUERY
See also https://imgur.com/a/4eN9S.
Is that correct? I can't find confirmation in the docs, so that's why I am asking it here.
reasoning
The reason why I asked about connecting Google Smart Home with my Dialogflow endpoint is that I already have that endpoint in place. I hoped I could do something similar as in https://stackoverflow.com/a/49119822/9038652, where I bound a Dialogflow intent to the actions_intent_OPTION event.
There isn't a reason to use Dialogflow to do smart home fulfillment, and it's actually not possible.
Dialogflow is great for taking unstructured user utterances and making sense of them. However, with smart home, Google handles all of the NLU and parsing. You, as the integration, will just receive a JSON request and will be expected to provide a JSON response.
So you will skip using Dialogflow and instead just build your webhook to parse the intents and give a valid response.
Dialogflow's service does not have a way to take in an intent name and expose a single endpoint URL that can be called by the Google Assistant. It also does not have integration with an OAuth server to do the account linking step.
I'd like to write an automated integration test to test my DialogFlow agent, integrated with Google Assistant.
Right now, I need to go through the flows, typing what the users "says" into the Actions On Google test console.
(I guess I could write a selenium script to do this - but it seems to me there has to be a way to do this by API...)
Although Dialogflow has an API that lets you issue queries against it, this probably hits the general Dialogflow processing and does not specifically represent what the Assistant would send.
I typically suggest testing against your fulfillment service rather than testing Dialogflow's processing itself. Since your fulfillment server has to be an HTTP[S] server, you can build the JSON body yourself, change the parameters as appropriate, and verify the JSON response. If you need, you can manually do it for some inputs to capture what the JSON will look like first.