As we discussed in previous article, we can make 3rd party apps for Google Assistant. Google Assistant is a Voice agent. It is an Artificial Intelligence made to understand human conversation and respond to it appropriately. Teaching a machine or a software to understand a conversation is not that easy. Why? Let’s see an example. You can ask time in different ways like;

“What time is it?”

“What is the time right now?”

“What’s the time?”

“Can you tell me the time, please?”

The intension of all these questions are to ask the time. If you are trying to build a software to understand the user’s intension, you will have to code thousands of lines of conditionals. That’s a nightmare! This where we need Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is needed. Natural Language Understanding is a part of Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLU helps to convert human languages in to machine language and vice versa.

So you need a NLU engine to develop Actions for Google Assistant. Don’t worry. Google has its own NLU Platform called Dialogflow. Dialogflow (former api.ai) is tightly integrated with Google Assistant to help developers to build Actions for Google easily. You can use this platform for free. Dialogflow has an enterprise edition as well for large scale deployments.

Dialogflow provides a very powerful NLU engine that can understand, process and respond to your user’s conversational requests. Dialogflow is fortified with all the tools you needed to develop Actions for Google Assistant in very short period of time.