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Not all chatbots are able to satisfy their users. For example, here is a March 2021 survey on the state of chatbots.
On this page, I provide a list of tips and recommendations which will help you build bots which work and improve your chances of success.
The checklist under “Conversation Design” is the most important. The others are not necessary, but will still significantly improve your chatbot accuracy and ease of maintenance.
| Applies to Dialogflow ES? | Applies to Dialogflow CX? | |
| Conversation Design | ||
| Design a conversation flowchart using Mindomo | Yes | Yes |
| Avoid slot filling | Yes | No |
| Minimize context lifespan | Yes | No |
| Minimize candidate intents at each step | Yes | No |
| Avoid entity overuse | Yes | Yes |
| Use wildcard entity carefully | Yes | Yes |
| Features to use and to avoid | ||
| Avoid the knowledge connectors feature | Yes | No |
| Don’t directly add a user utterance from the Training dialog into an intent | Yes | No |
| Learn about Regex Entities | Yes | Yes |
| Construct JSON inline (instead of using the fulfillment library) | Yes | Yes |
| Use direct API calls (instead of client library) | Yes | Yes |
| Use versioning | Yes | Yes |
| Improve Bot Accuracy | ||
| Audit entity annotation | Yes | Yes |
| Design your intents to maximize cohesion and separation | Yes | Yes |
| Auto-generate test scripts from your training phrases | Yes | Yes |
| Set up automated conversation testing | Yes | Included |
| Add true positives and true negatives into your test script | Yes | Yes |
| Download ES conversation logs to audit your bot | Yes | No |
| Download CX conversation logs to audit your bot | No | Yes |
| Learn the basics of NLU | Yes | Yes |
| Learn spaCy | Yes | Yes |
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