REST API

Note: this guide is meant for programmers who are familiar with APIs Recently I was talking to someone who has built a cross-bot-framework conversation designer – like an abstraction layer which sits on top of all the major bot frameworks and provides drag-and-drop interfaces to design your bot. It is an interesting idea, but there…

As you try and use Dialogflow’s REST API, one of the things you will notice is that the documentation talks about “service accounts”. In this article, we will see what these service accounts are and how they are typically used. Instead of going over any big theory (which is also important to fully master the…

First published: Aug 2017 | Last Updated: Oct 2020 So let us understand the question: When you work with Dialogflow you notice that it follows the “user types something -> agent replies with an answer” sequence. Suppose you wish to get the agent to say something before the user types anything, how do you do…

I have created a course on Dialogflow’s REST API v2. In my view, this course will teach you pretty much everything you need to know to work with Dialogflow REST API v2. You can check it out here. Topics covered in the course include: different types of OAuth2 authentication how the three legged auth flow…

I got a question from a reader: Can I use a client side JavaScript app built using Ionic with Dialogflow’s v2 REST API? It could have also been Angular, or React, or one of the other bajillion other JavaScript frameworks. 🙂 The answer to all of you: No! The workaround You need to use the…

If you are building complex integrations for Dialogflow, odds are you need to build custom Dialogflow middleware. Custom Dialogflow middleware Let us first understand what I mean by custom Dialogflow middleware. What is custom Dialogflow middleware? Here is an example of what I mean. The 1-click web demo integration of Dialogflow doesn’t support a lot…

This is a very basic tutorial for getting started with the PHP Client Library for Dialogflow API v2. I don’t cover any advanced stuff, but it should help you get started. 1 Create a new folder for your project In my case, I am just calling it quickstart. 2 Download the client secret JSON file…

I have been asked this question by a few folks recently. While it generally depends on the “stage” of your Dialogflow project, I think the answer is tending towards Yes already. What stage is your project on? First, what stage are you in your project? Later stage project If you are later stage in your…

I was recently asked about integrating a Dialogflow health chatbot with the Infermedica API. While I haven’t personally done this yet, I realized that I have been getting questions about API integrations recently, and they all don’t mean the same thing. Here are some of the types of APIs you will be dealing with when…

Dialogflow recently announced that version 2 of their API is generally available. I have been asked by some readers as to what this means for their integrations, and I have summarized it in this article. How it works v2 API is quite different from v1 API even in the way the basic system works. For…

If you are using Dialogflow’s REST API, these tips can help speed up your development. Use the Postman app If you hadn’t used it already, Postman calls itself “the complete toolchain of API developers”. For our case, Postman allows you to take the various API calls you see in the Dialogflow documentation and test these…

Last week, Dialogflow announced the availability of v2 of their API. It is still in beta, and there are some fairly significant changes coming up. [Also, a quick comment that I am very glad they changed their name from API.AI before this announcement. Otherwise people will be referring to API.AI API v2 vs API.AI API…