Draft

In this tutorial I will explain how you can create a custom integration for Dialogflow CX using Python Flask.

I use Zoho SalesIQ as the example integration. There are 4 layers of a Dialogflow bot, and Zoho SalesIQ, if you notice, provides us with the UI Layer. So we only need to create the middleware (integration) layer to get the CX integration to work with Zoho SalesIQ.

PythonAnywhere

If you are using Python for your Dialogflow bot (which I recommend), you need to host the middleware code on one of the cloud hosting services.

I will be using PythonAnywhere for the hosting the integration code. I have chosen it over other platforms for a few reasons that I have listed below.

	PythonAnywhere	Google Cloud Functions	Heroku	Render
Debugging UX	Simple	Very challenging	Simple	Simple
Has a fully free tier	Yes	Quota	Soon to be deprecated	Yes
Wake up delay for free plan (this is a problem for chatbots)	No	No	Yes	Yes
Bounded cost for paid tier	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Support	Very good	Poor	OK	Good
Documentation	Very good	Poor	Very good (sets the benchmark)	Pretty good
Scalability	OK	Best-in-class	Good	Good
Reliability	OK	Best-in-class	Good	Good
Multiple endpoints in single app	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Overall complexity	Moderate	Very high	Low	Low

You can use the technique I describe here for storing GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS on all these platforms. But PythonAnywhere wins out for its overall simplicity (in my opinion).

For the rest of the article, I will refer to PythonAnywhere as PA.

Create a new web app

First, create a free account on PA.

In the Dashboard, click on

Create a new virtual environment

Set the venv for the web app

Open Bash Console for that venv

create a new folder called app and cd into it

git clone () into the app folder

pip install

open wsgi file and make suitable modifications

download service account file

compress the JSON

add GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS key and paste the compressed JSON into the value

upload .env file into your app folder

Create a new Zobot and choose Webhook as the integration option

Paste the URL of the pythonanywhere app into the URL

You will see a checkmark

Now create the integration