How to enhance your customer experience with Virtual Beings and Dialogflow

From chatbot to Virbe - Turning Dialogflow project into Virtual Being

A conversational experience may not be on top of your list when you think about customer service but it’s actually a critical element to meet your customers’ expectations in a personalised way. And our Virbes powered with Dialogflow make it possible.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could deliver more natural customer experiences with virtual beings that can handle multi-turn conversations, add supplemental questions and are built with the deep learning technologies that power Google Assistant? 

Wouldn’t it be just fantastic if you could reduce development time from days to minutes with a visual builder and prebuilt agents, then easily deploy across your contact centre and digital channels, including web, mobile, and messaging services? 

And what if you could easily manage your virtual beings with end-to-end CI/CD through versioning and continuous evaluation and with flow-based modules that allow scaling up to 20 independent flows and 40,000 intents for each agent?

Well, let me tell you the big news: it can be done. 

Pretty easily in fact. 

And I intend to prove that here.

But before we jump in. Or before you begin turning your project into a conversational masterpiece by integrating Dialogflow ES or Dialogflow CX into Virbe platform, I think it would be valuable for you to learn a bit about the main building block behind the whole experience.

What is Dialogflow?

Dialogflow is a natural language understanding platform that makes it easy to design and integrate a conversational user interface into your mobile app, web application, device, bot, interactive voice response system, and so on. Using Dialogflow, you can provide new and engaging ways for users to interact with your product.

Dialogflow can analyse multiple types of input from your customers, including text or audio inputs (like from a phone or voice recording). It can also respond to your customers in a couple of ways, either through text or with synthetic speech.

Our Dialogflow integration also supports rich messages that can include elements like images, links, and suggestions buttons. Please have a look at our e-commerce assistant Stephen showing products to the customer in a chat box window here:

And you may actually have a go talking to Stephen on the website prepared to showcase his skills here

If we got you intrigued enough and you would like to create your Dialogflow chatbot from scratch I recommend visiting Google documentation to get you started on the right foot. Once you have your chatbot ready you may turn your existing Dialogflow project into Virbe.

How to import your existing Dialogflow project into Virbe

If you want to use Dialogflow ES chatbot as a Conversational AI for your Virbe you need to create or use an existing GCP service account and import the access credentials into your Virbe Dashboard. You will need two things:

• Dialogflow project ID
• Dialogflow API Key (as JSON file)

To see how to acquire them head out to our documentation: https://docs.virbe.ai/create-new-being/conversational-ai/dialogflow. Once you do have them:

1. Copy your Dialogflow Project ID, head on to the Conversation Engine configuration page in your Virbe Dashboard (e.g. https://being-name-your-organization.virbe.app/dashboard/conversation-engine/edit) then paste it to the field.
2. Open the Dialogflow API Key JSON on your computer in any editor you like (e.g. Notepad or IDE) and copy-paste the contents into the Virbe Dashboard.

Do not worry this content is stored only in your dedicated cloud container. Only people you authorize will have access to its content. At any point, you can invalidate it into the Google Cloud Console.

Once you do the above please use the built-in web widget to test your configuration. If you've done everything right you should see and hear the response. If you haven't, your Virbe will let you know that something went wrong.

And that's all. You are good to go and rule the world with your new Virbe! For any issues with the above sections please refer to the Dialogflow setup documentation or contact our support through our Discord.

Partner with Virbe

If you would like to discuss ways we could work together or if you wish to find out more about Virtual Beings please connect with me on LinkedIn or send me an email at [email protected].