Avoid these 4 Dialogflow ES features

I recommend that people who build Dialogflow ES bots avoid these four features.

The slot filling feature makes for a really good demo, and also is a very good way to get familiar with Dialogflow for the first day or two.

But it is not a good idea to use slot filling to build your ES bot.

However, slot filling in Dialogflow CX works quite well and I recommend people use it in CX when it makes sense.

When you create an output context in Dialogflow, it automatically assigns a context lifespan of 5 as the default value.

I recommend changing this value to 1 so as to minimize the candidate intents at each step of the conversation.

While the knowledge connector is actually a fairly nice idea, in practice, it has too many limitations.

You can get around a lot of these limitations by simply building an intent based FAQ bot which provides the same set of features.

When they were first released, Mega Agents were expected to fix the problem of a Dialogflow ES bot with “too many intents”.

Again, in practice, Mega Agents were not able to handle these scenarios all that well. I do not recommend using that feature.

Interestingly, you can avoid all these issues in Dialogflow CX. However, CX has a steeper learning curve and is also more expensive to use than ES.