(Autogenerated transcript)
[00:00:00]
Alright, so the first thing that I would like you to do is go and read this Dialogflow Python Webhook tutorial I have on my site and I want you to do that in some good detail. And here is the reason why I am suggesting that. Now if you scroll down to the static response section in the tutorial, what you will notice is that there is this sort of like a small piece of code that you can use and here I am using this service called Replit so you can just copy paste this entire code into the Replit REPL and you will have a working webhook at that point. What I have is a very small chunk of code which does the task. You know we are trying to get it to work and I am not interested in creating like a very complex bot which goes and looks up like a big database and comes back with a bunch of information and you know does a whole bunch of things and finally produces this fulfillment
[00:01:00]
information and gets the rich response to render into the Dialogflow Messenger bot. And of course most of the online tutorials you find would probably do that and I don't blame them they are trying to focus on something else where they are trying to help you build a bot from end to end but the problem there is that often you don't understand the individual components which are required to make this work. In contrast in this tutorial that I have created what I am doing is I am going to I am taking you step by step through creating more and more complex webhooks. So that way you understand what the most basic thing is like you need to know like just sending a chunk of information back from your webhook is actually sufficient to have something show up in your you know messenger bot or whatever you are building and when you start from that point it actually becomes easier for you to build other things on top of it.
[00:02:00]
And in the case of rich responses for Dialogflow integrations like for example the Dialogflow Messenger or maybe you are using Slack or Skype or you know WhatsApp or something like that all of them require that you understand the of course for WhatsApp there are no rich responses but let's say it's the Facebook messenger there is a you have to understand the format that you have to send the data across and before you get into that details about the format you should first have something which is very simple and which actually works and is able to produce some result in the chat user interface of the specific integration that you are building and that is why I think that it's a good idea to start by creating some webhook code which does the absolute minimum that you need to do to get it to work and then once you do that you can build on top of it and maybe pull the data from like
[00:03:00]
instead of like just generating it in the code instead of hard coding those values into the webhook you can instead maybe you know get the information from a database and do things like that but those things have to be after the first step and the first step is that you understand the different moving parts so that you get a good picture of what is going on and then you will be able to do the more complex things very quickly.
About this website
BotFlo1 was created by Aravind Mohanoor as a website which provided training and tools for non-programmers who were2 building Dialogflow chatbots.
This website has now expanded into other topics in Natural Language Processing, including the recent Large Language Models (GPT etc.) with a special focus on helping non-programmers identify and use the right tool for their specific NLP task.
For example, when not to use GPT
1 BotFlo was previously called MiningBusinessData. That is why you see that name in many videos
2 And still are building Dialogflow chatbots. Dialogflow ES first evolved into Dialogflow CX, and Dialogflow CX itself evolved to add Generative AI features in mid-2023
