How to Make a Dialogflow Chatbot? A Beginner’s Guide

By Abhinav Girdhar | Last Updated on January 21st, 2023 10:08 am | 4-min read

Chatbots are the talk of the town today, and with good reason. Businesses of different scales and sizes are using chatbots for a variety of intents and purposes including, but not limited to marketing, lead qualification, lead nurturing, customer service, and more!

Chatbot builders have made this cutting-edge technology accessible and affordable for businesses with budget and resource restrictions. Appy Pie Chatbot has emerged as the perfect solution for startups and enterprises alike by offering no-code chatbot development with excellent outcomes.

In this blog, we will discuss Dialogflow, the natural language understanding platform from Google, how to make a chatbot using Dialogflow, limitations of Dialogflow, and discuss the advantages of no-code chatbot development with Appy Pie Chatbot as well.

What is Dialogflow?

Dialogflow is a popular natural language processing (NLP) platform. It is an excellent tool for creating conversational applications like chatbots to help companies provide an evolved customer experience. Powered by Google, Dialogflow lets the developers create text-based and voice-based chatbots to serve their customers and provide an engaging experience.

Benefits of Dialogflow

Dialogflow has gained popularity among the developers, and here are the reasons why:

• Dialogflow is known for being user-friendly and intuitive. The platform has an integrated code editor and a serverless application structure.
• The platform offers multilingual integrations in more than 20 languages.
• Dialogflow offers software development kits for a variety of devices, including mobile devices, wearables, cars, and other smart devices.

How do Dialogflow chatbots work?

Here are the steps to showcase the process in which your Dialogflow chatbot works:

1. A user comes to your platform and enters their query through text or voice message through a device.
2. The device sends the message to Dialogflow.
3. This message is then categorized and matched to a corresponding intent.
4. Each corresponding action is defined in the fulfillment.
5. Once Dialogflow finds a particular intent, the webhook uses external APIs to look for the relevant response in external databases.
6. These external databases then send the relevant responses to the webhook.
7. Next, the webhook sends the formatted response to the intent.
8. Now, the intent generates actionable data depending on the channels.
9. This actionable data then goes out to the device.
10. Finally, the user gets the desired response.

How to make Dialogflow chatbot?

You can make your own Dialogflow chatbot, Dialogflow voice chatbot, or even Dialogflow FAQ bot by following these simple steps below.

Create an agent

1. Go to Dialogflow, create your own account (if you do not have one already), and log in.

2. In the left navigation menu, click on the “Create Agent” option and fill in all the required fields.

3. Give your agent a name and select the preferred language. Finally, click the ‘Save’ button.

Create an intent

Before you start creating your first intent, you must know what intent is. An intent essentially is the element that matches your user query with the desired agent action.

Here is how you can create an intent on Dialogflow:

4. First, click on the plus icon next to intents.

5. Enter the name of your intent. Though you can name it whatever you want, a good thumb rule is to make it indicative of the intent’s goal.

6. Now, go to the Training Phrases section. Here, you can enter as many iterations of the user’s query as you can. Of course, the more iterations you include here, the greater the chances of the agent understanding the user query.

7. Click ‘Save’.

Add response

You have created an agent to ensure that the users’ queries are met with appropriate responses. This is the time to supply the responses to the agent.

8. Just like how you entered all the likely iterations of queries entered by the users, you now need to come up with the appropriate agent response to each possible iteration.

9. Click the ‘Save’ button.

Test the agent

Type in a request in the console to test your Dialogflow chatbot. During this test, you can try to vary the query a little from the phrases you entered in the Training Phrases section. Hit ‘Enter’ after typing in your query, and the following should happen.

• The agent should provide an appropriate response based on the values you provided
• The proper intent must be triggered.
• The response must reflect the appropriate values as entered in the training phrases section.

Basic fulfillment (Webhooks)

In some instances, this may prove to be insufficient. In these cases, you can get additional data from external databases using external APIs and by defining custom Webhooks.
You can write your webhooks in Python or Node.js and hold them on cloud servers like Heroku, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform, or even a local server if you wish.

Dialogflow chatbot Integration

Your Dialogflow chatbot can be integrated with the most popular apps and voice assistants through a mere click of a button.

Limitations of Dialogflow

Yes, Dialogflow is popular. Yes, it comes from the tech giant – Google. But, that does not mean it comes without its own set of limitations and shortcomings. Let’s discuss.

• Lack of reusability

Though the platform is fairly intuitive and easy to use, it lacks flexibility and maneuverability. One of the most common challenges developers face is that they cannot just drag and move a follow-up response from one intent to another. They will have to delete the entire intent, go to the new desired location, and create an intent from scratch, including re-typing all the training phrases again.

• Number of Webhooks

With Dialogflow, you can only add one Webhook for one project. It may not seem like a big deal to begin with, however, it does become a bit of a challenge down the line. You will be able to use just one webhook for the entire chatbot instead of having webhooks for an intent.

Why choose Appy Pie Chatbot?

Appy Pie Chatbot is a no-code chatbot development platform that lets you build your own chatbot and integrate it into your website in minutes!

Here are the reasons why you must choose Appy Pie Chatbot over all other competitors.

• Needs no coding

Appy Pie Chatbot requires no coding. This means you save money and time and create a chatbot without hiring an agency or professional developers.

• Offers multi-lingual bot development

You can serve customers from all over the world with your own multilingual chatbot. Appy Pie helps you build chatbots that can manage conversations in multiple languages, including English, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, and more.

• Multiple chatbots

You can create an unlimited number of chatbots depending on the intent or goal you have in mind. Whether you want to create an inquiry chatbot, appointment chatbots, or item ordering chatbot, Appy Pie Chatbot can help you out.

• Efficient lead nurturing

Use your chatbot to collect the email addresses of users and keep track of all the leads in an organized manner. Never let even a single lead slip through the cracks.

• Fast to market

Don’t waste your time in months of development when you can build a chatbot in minutes. This means you can make it to the market before your competitors and gain an edge.

How to build a chatbot – without coding!

Appy Pie – the pioneers of no-code development can help you make your own chatbot in minutes. Here are the steps:

Give your chatbot a name
Choose a name for your chatbot and select the type that works the best for your business.

Customize the chatbot
Add your brand logo, change the brand colors, add the chatbot script you wrote, and make it your own.

Integrate the chatbot
Add the chatbot widget to your website and respond to your users’ queries in real-time.