How to handle async API calls in Actions on Google - actions-on-google

Question

I'm using actions-on-google github nodejs app with DialogFlow. I'm trying to figure out how to make an async api call that takes longer than 5 seconds and return the response to the user when the response is ready, considering that actions on google returns Malformat error if a response is not received from the intent within 5 seconds.
This is a simple code snippet of my code:
app.intent('first-intent', async (conv: any) => {
conv.ask('Please wait while we make our long api call...');
await myPrivateFunction();
})
// I have put API_RESPONSE_RECEIVED as Events in DialogFlow
app.intent('second-intent', (conv: any) => {
console.log('This is second-intent');
var response = conv.data.apiResponse;
conv.ask(response);
})
function myPrivateFunction(): Promise<void> {
utils.apiCall().then(apiResponse => {
console.log('api response received');
conv.data.apiResponse = apiResponse;
conv.followup('API_RESPONSE_RECEIVED');
});
}
In my Firebase logs I can see "Please wait while we make our long api call..." and "api response received", but not "This is second-intent". If I put conv.followup('API_RESPONSE_RECEIVED') outside the api call right after conv.ask('Please wait while we make our long api call...'), I see "This is second-intent". So, app.followup looks OK and apparently the problem is about how I'm handling the promise, but I don't know how to fix it.
I'm using TypeScript targeting es5 in my development environment. So, I can use await/async on my api call. However, using await causes that malformat error since the api call takes longer than 5 seconds.

Answer 1

We don't really have a good way to handle this right now, but we have a couple of approaches that sorta work based on your needs.
Notifications are currently available for the Assistant on smartphones, and they're coming for speakers. In some cases, it might make sense to say that you're working on the problem and you'll send a notification when you have it, and then resume the conversation from the notification.
Another approach is to use the Media Response to play a bit of "hold music". Under this scheme, you would start the async call, but also immediately send back the "hold music response". When the long async call completes, it would save the result in a local cache. At the end of the segment of music, your webhook will get a notice that the music has completed. If you have the result available in the local cache, you can report it at that time, otherwise you would play more hold music and repeat this process.