From the course: Building Chatbots Using Google Dialogflow

Dialogflow building blocks - Google Cloud Tutorial

From the course: Building Chatbots Using Google Dialogflow

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Dialogflow building blocks

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- [Narrator] Dialogflow is composed of a variety of components that make up the natural language understanding engine which helps us to build out great conversational experiences for users. It all begins with the Dialogflow agent, which can be thought of as the virtual agent that handles conversations with your users. You can think of the agent as the parent container that encompasses your entire chat bot or conversational application. Your agent contains intents, and these help to respond to user's requests. An agent can be composed of a few to even thousands of intents for conversational experiences that may contain many branches, twists, and turns. Intents and Dialogflow make it easy to align what users say to specific requests that you can address. The next major concept you will hear about is entities. These are essentially intent parameter types and they dictate how data from a user expression is extracted. In order to respond to a user's request, we need to be able to extract data and understand what is being asked when our intent handles the request. Entities allow us to get at those key bits of data like an appointment time a user is requesting, what service they are looking for, the type of room they're trying to book, et cetera. Another concept you will hear of is context, and this helps us to understand the flow of a conversation, and this is used to pass a frame of reference from one intent to another. And that way you will know where you are in the conversation. The last major concept you will hear about in the Dialogflow ecosystem is fulfillment. This is what makes conversational experiences and Dialogflow dynamic, as fulfillment allows you to execute backend logic and makes calls off the APIs and services behind the scenes to either retrieve information that can be used to help the user, such as getting current specials for a store or retrieving their account balance, or making updates, such as scheduling an appointment in the calendar. We're going to dive into each of these topics in a little more detail, and will be using all these constructs in this course.

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