Building Conversational Experiences With Actions On Google

Here are the slides that I used this week in two events. It gives you a good overview of what can be done these days with Assistant Apps.

What is an Assistant App?

The Google Assistant is Google’s conversational software for helping you get things done in your world. It is the culmination of all of Google’s research in AI, ML and NLP. It runs on various devices, including the Google Home which launched in 2017, as well as many Android and iOS devices.

Actions on Google is the third-party platform for the Google Assistant, allowing you, the developer to manage a conversation between your service and the user.

An interesting times!

A Bitcoin(er) Info Action!

 In the past few weeks I worked (20% of the time) on this new assistant application that will give you interesting information about Bitcoin.

Here is an example of what you can do:

• The price of bitcoin
• Market cap
• Blocks count
• Total amount of bitcoins

This is how the conversation looks like on the web simulator.
You open it with the main capabilities that it can provide:

A New Assistant App – Animal Cool Jokes!

Actions on Google lets you build apps for the Google Assistant. Your apps can help you engage users through Google Home, Android phones, iPhones, and in the future, through every experience where the Google Assistant is available (e.g. Auto, IoT etc’).

One of the nice benefits is that users don’t need to install anything to interact with your apps. When they ask for your app by name, the assistant will connect them with you immediately.

Another benefit is the ability to make money. You can let Google Assistant users on phones purchase goods and services using new or existing payment methods on file either with Google or with your service. But that will be a topic for a future post.

Let’s start with a simple example… Remember that in last April I wrote about “Build you first smart bot for Google Home“?

Well, after few improvements to the quality of the jokes, of course, this assistant app is now live!

You can talk with it by asking “talk with Animal cool jokes“.

Here is what it looks like:

How To Improve Your Conversation Design?

We’re entering a promising new era of computing, where advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence are creating a resurgence of interest in voice interfaces and natural language processing.

It’s a new way to talk with your users.

For real.

Thus, we need to think on the voice user interface from the start and see how we can do a better job.

In this post, we will go over some of the most common challenges and how to overcome them.

Google #IO17 – Actions On Google

The past 3 days were packed with developers, sessions, announcements and good weather at Shoreline.

Here are some of the things that I really liked (and marked myself to try later):

What is new with the Google Assistant.

You can learn why actions on google is great option for developers and what you can do with it in your own hardware.

How to build apps for the Google Assistant

The Google Assistant’s mission is to help users get things done in their world.

This video below will explain how to plug into the Google Assistant services ecosystem. It covers everything from understanding the business use case and high level user interface design to implementation and growing usage.

Share Location On The Web With Waze

If you have a website that contain ‘just’ your (business) address you can do better.

How?

You can use the links below to help your users navigate to you with one click.

This will save them the trouble to ‘select’, ‘copy’ and open their map app in order to get to you. Waze supports an API which enables developers to open the Waze client application through an external URL. The URL can be accessed from within your mobile web page or web app.

The following are the available parameters you can insert to your ‘a href’ tag:

Integrate Your API.AI Bot With Slack

It’s really easy and powerful to work with API.AI as a tool for creating your bots. Not only you are getting a powerful machine learning algorithm to understand your users, you get in the same time an easy way to integrate with many services (e.g. Google Home, Twitter, Facebook messenger, Slack, Telegram, Skype and many more).

What is API.AI?

API.AI is a natural language understanding platform that makes it easy for developers to design and integrate intelligent and sophisticated conversational user interfaces into mobile apps, web applications, devices, and bots.
If you never worked with API.AI – You can check it out in this post.

What is Slack?

I just copied from this site, because it’s short and to the point:

Where work^* happens.

*Whatever work means for you, Slack brings all the pieces and people you need together so you can actually get things done.
If you are a developer that worked with IRC in the past – Slack is a (much) ‘nicer’ version of it. You get the productivity of a mobile chat tool with many options for integrations and automations.

Now, that we got the tools defined, let’s see how to integrate API.AI and Slack in nine elegant ‘dance movements’.