03 When should you migrate your ES bot to CX?

Byaravindmc

Dialogflow ES vs Dialogflow CX

Here are some tips to help you decide if you should migrate your ES bot to CX.

The feature is implemented poorly in ES

Dialogflow ES has a Mega-Agent feature but it is quite poorly implemented. You might be better off using multiple Flows in Dialogflow CX in case you need some similar functionality.

Similarly, the new Dialogflow CX Messenger is a lot better than the legacy Dialogflow ES Messenger. If you are creating a website chatbot, CX would be a good choice.

I also think Dialogflow team is now focusing almost entirely on CX, so this situation is unlikely to improve.

You are getting poor intent mapping in your ES bot

If you have a lot of intents in your ES bot and you are getting poor intent mapping, there are two possibilities. If you don’t have multi-turn conversations (essentially a pure FAQ bot), it is very unlikely you will gain anything by migrating to Dialogflow CX.

On the other hand, if you have complex, multi-turn conversations in your ES bot, you would almost certainly benefit from migrating to CX because it uses a state-machine based approach and you will not have needless interference from conflicting intents.

Your ES bot frequently provides unexpected responses when it goes “off track”

If you use a very fine-grained approach like the explicative approach, you must be prepared to handle a lot of corner cases. If you don’t do it, and your bot often goes into a bad state, you will often get a lot of unexpected responses. In this case there is some intent in your bot which could have handled the user’s input, but it may not be a candidate intent and will not fire.

In such cases, it is definitely time to migrate your bot to CX since CX can easily recover back into a good state even when the conversation goes off track.

Your followup intents are deeply nested

If you have many levels of hierarchy in your followup intent tree (I think five is already quite high), it is probably time to migrate to CX.

Not only are followup intents very easy to migrate to CX, you will also have a much easier time maintaining their state once you migrate your bot.

You are getting poor entity extraction in your ES bot

The entity extraction feature is definitely better in CX, so it would be a good idea to migrate if you get poor entity extraction. But this is usually easy to test, so I would recommend testing if the entity is getting extracted correctly in CX first before doing the migration.

Your bot will benefit from generative AI

At the end of August 2023, Google made Generative AI generally available in Dialogflow CX. But Generative AI is not available in Dialogflow ES.

I think if you design them thoughtfully, almost all chatbots will benefit at least a little from Generative AI.

So I suggest learning about Generative Dialogflow CX, and migrating to CX if you think your bot will benefit from those features. 

Note: This is my old website and is in maintenance mode. I am publishing new articles only on my new website. 

If you are not sure where to start on my new website, I recommend the following article:

Is Dialogflow still relevant in the era of Large Language Models?

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