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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