15 How to create a Chatfuel style decision tree chatbot in Dialogflow

One of the nice things about tools like Chatfuel and ManyChat is their visual interface for creating decision tree chatbots.

What are decision tree chatbots?

These go by many names – conditional logic chatbots, click-bots, scripted bots (which I like the best).

The important thing is that the entire conversation is pre-scripted, there isn’t any Natural Language Understanding or AI of any sort, and people chat with your bot by simply choosing (clicking on) one of the options presented as buttons.

You can create similar chatbots using Dialogflow, and I will explain how in this article.

In this article, I will explain how to create a Decision Tree chatbot using Dialogflow ES.

A decision tree chatbot, as the name suggests, is a “scripted” bot which will ask the user to select between two or more options and move the conversation based on the user’s choice.

Dichotomous Key Bot

We will be building a Dichotomous Key bot, which will ask the user to answer Yes/No questions and based on the answer, will identify a given vertebrate as either a mammal, or a bird, or a reptile, or a fish or an amphibian.

This is a tree structure so technically, it CAN be built using follow up intentsBoth Dialogflow ES and Dialogflow CX have the concept of int... More. However, because the answers are of the Yes/No type, this could lead to conflicts between follow up intents.

Here is the Mindomo flowchart for this decision tree

So we just go through this flowchart and build out our intents to reflect it.

Add an intent called identify.vertebrate

Add an intent called hasfur.YES

Add a corresponding intent for hasfur.NO

Keep following this pattern for all the nodes in the flowchart

Finally we come to hasgills.YES

And hasgills.NO

Here is a demo of the bot in actionYou define an action in Dialogflow ES intents to tell your w... More

About this website

I created this website to provide training and tools for non-programmers who are building Dialogflow chatbots. 

I have now changed my focus to Vertex AI Search, which I think is a natural evolution from chatbots. 

Note 

BotFlo was previously called MiningBusinessData. That is why you see that watermark in many of my previous videos.