Chat apps available from Google Google Chat Help

Google Workspace Updates: Slash commands and dialogs now available for Google Chat bots

You could, for example, build Google Hangouts chatbots using a variety of different technologies including Cloud Functions, HTTP web services, Cloud Pub/Sub, and Webhooks, to name a few. With Bot-in-a-Box, you can quickly combine the power of Business Messages that turns search queries into conversations, and Dialogflow to provide a turnkey solution to automate customer interactions with a business. Now that I have Bot-in-a-Box configured, I go back to the conversation I started with the Business Messages Helper Bot on my phone and try asking a question.

As the user asks questions, text auto-complete helps shape queries towards high-quality results. For example, if the user starts to type “How does the 7 Pro compare,” the assistant might suggest, “How does the 7 Pro compare to my current device? ” If the shopper accepts this suggestion, the assistant can generate a multimodal comparison table, complete with images and a brief summary. To add trusted testers and learn more about testing interactive features, see

Test interactive features for

Google Chat apps. You now have working app code that you can try out (as described in the

following steps) and then customize to meet your requirements. We built our bot in three easy steps, which should look familiar to you if  you’ve completed the Deconstructing Chatbots video series.

Developing your own custom Google Chat bot is a great way for users and teams to interact with your solutions and services both directly and within context as they collaborate in Chat. More specifically, Chat bots can be used in group conversations to streamline workflows, assist with activities in the context of discussions, and provide information and notifications in real time. Chat bots can also be used in direct messages, offering a new way to optimize workflows and personal productivity, such as managing project tasks or reporting time activity. Because use cases for bots are varied, you can consistently reach a growing audience of Chat users over time, directly where they work and uh-hum, chat. This no-code solution can easily be extended using Dialogflow’s fulfillment feature to pull in business information from a database or API, allowing you to support even more complex user journeys. For this example, I’m going to create a helper bot that can answer questions about Business Messages.

Build a simple Chat app

In fact, you can even reuse or share some of your Add-on UIs within your Chat bots, but do note there currently is a lighter subset of elements available for bots. The benefits of using Cards allows you to build modern, consistently-styled user interfaces for your bots that doesn’t require that you get bogged down in low level details like managing tags or CSS. To make building your Cards-based interfaces for Add-ons and Chat bots even easier, we have also just introduced the GWAO Card Builder tool, which employs a drag-n-drop visual designer to boost your development efforts.

In this simple example, Bridgepoint Runners represents a local business, but Business Messages also works for web-based businesses. Google’s Business Messages let customers message a business directly from Google Search, Google Maps, and any brand-managed property. Developers of Business Messages can leverage tools like Dialogflow to create AI-powered conversational experiences, where customers can chat with lifelike virtual agents that understand, interact, and talk in natural ways. In addition to the new generative capabilities, we have also added prebuilt components to reduce the time and effort required to deploy common conversational AI tasks and vertical-specific use cases. These components provide out-of-the-box templates for virtual agents and integrations, including much-requested features for collecting Numerical and Credit Card CVV inputs.

• To handle this event you can use the example above with non-dialog Slash Command, using the commandId you can use a switch to determine what the user requested.
• This is super helpful as more and more bots are added to a room, and as more bots with slash commands are introduced by developers.
• After creating the JSON structure for a card, I click Save and re-enter the chat on my phone asking “Who made this bot?
• No subscription plan has been announced yet, but for comparison, a monthly subscription to ChatGPT Plus with GPT-4 costs $20.

With Conversational AI on Gen App Builder, organizations can orchestrate interactions, keeping users on task and productive while also enabling free-flowing conversation that lets them redirect the topic as needed. These new capabilities are fully integrated with Dialogflow so customers can add them to their existing agents, google bot chat mixing fully deterministic and generative capabilities. Learning to build chatbots, with all the available approaches and technologies, can seem daunting. Similarly, building Google Hangouts chatbots can require some early decisions on server architectures, technical implementations, and even programming languages.

Filter by product

The first step to setting up Bot-in-a-Box is to enable the Dialogflow integration. Currently, Bot-in-a-Box only supports the Dialogflow Essentials (ES) version of Dialogflow. However, you can integrate with Dialogflow Customer Experience (CX) by calling the CX APIs directly from a configured Business Messages webhook and programming the conversion to and from the Business Messages APIs. Once the agent is created, I can select the agent to see additional details and access the various configuration options. Business Messages is a mobile conversational channel that combines entry points from Google Maps, Search, and brand websites to create rich, asynchronous messaging experiences.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Here is a simple example used to determine if a Slash Command was invoked by the user, and if so, runs the requested command identified by its Command Id.

Additionally, after the quickstart, you’ll have configured a webhook and created your first Business Messages agent. Agents include properties like the brand’s logo, the agent’s display name, the welcome message that greets a user, and more that define how the conversation will look and where the chat button will show up once launched. As shown in the example image below, I’ve searched “Bridgepoint Runners” and the results point me to a local Bridgepoint Runners store, which contains buttons to call, get directions, or go to their website.

The assistant then asks if the shopper needs anything else, with the user replying that they’re interested in switching to a business account. This answer triggers the assistant to loop a human agent into the conversation, showcasing how prescribed paths can be seamlessly integrated into a primarily generative experience. When a user invokes your bot via a Slash Command, there is a slashCommand field attached to the message Chat PG sent to the bot that indicates the call was initiated from a Slash Command. Remember users can still @mention your bot to call it directly by name without a / command and this helps you distinguish the difference. The message also includes the corresponding commandId for the invoked command based on what you set up in the bot configuration page, allowing you to identify the user’s requested command to execute.

Now with dialogs, users can be led visually to supply inputs via prompts, versus having to rely on wrapping bot commands with natural language inputs — and hoping they correctly executed syntax the bot could decipher. The first new(er) feature that you can leverage to enhance the usability of your Chat bots are slash commands. Released a few months back, slash commands simplify the way users interact with your Chat bot, offering them a visual leading way to discover and execute your bot’s primary features. Whereas the assistant generated earlier answers from the website’s content, in the case of the lens question, the response involves information that’s not contained in the organization’s site. This flexibility allows for a better experience than the “Sorry, I can’t answer that” responses we have come to expect from bots. When applicable, these types of responses include citations so the user knows what source content was used to generate the answer.

Besides, it also integrates a couple of bots that you can use for certain activities. Let’s assume the user wants to drill into the comparison, which notes that unlike the user’s current device, the Pixel 7 Pro includes a 48 megapixel camera with a telephoto lens. ”, triggering the assistant to explain that this term refers to a lens that’s typically greater than 70mm in focal length, ideal for magnifying distant objects, and generally used for wildlife, sports, and portraits.

Switching back  to responses grounded in the website content, the assistant answers with interactive visual inputs to help the user assess how the condition of their current phone could influence trade-in value. Once your bot is finished processing its task, it can respond back to the user in one of two ways. The first is with a simple acknowledgement (aka OK) response letting them know their action was handled correctly and close out the dialog.

In this case, Roles, Skills, and Accounts are all required parameters for this intent to be fulfilled (and the user can provide these in any order they like). Suppose a shopper looking for a new phone visits a website that includes a chat assistant. The shopper begins by telling the assistant they’d like to upgrade to a new Google phone. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. To set up the script, you use a template and then set your

Cloud project in Apps Script.

Behind the scenes, Dialogflow will use machine learning to process the document and recognize questions similar to what exists in the FAQ. If I send myself the test URL and open the conversation on my phone, I’ll see that the Helper Bot has the greeting I configured and three conversation starters. Since I haven’t configured Bot-in-a-Box or a webhook to respond to user messages, if I send a message to the bot, nothing will happen.

To get started, read more about Gen App Builder and conversational AI technologies from Google Cloud, and reach out to your sales representative for access to conversational AI on Gen App Builder. We’ve been pleased to see the innovative results our customers have already achieved with pre-GA releases of Gen App Builder. For example, Orange France recently launched Orange Bot, a French-language generative AI-enabled chatbot. The chatbot stems from a long-term business vision to transform the customer relationship, optimize management costs, and offer ever more helpful and user-friendly experiences.

Google does not allow access to Bard if you are not willing to create an account. Users of Google Workspace accounts may need to switch over to their personal email account to try Gemini. A version of the model, called Gemini Pro, is available inside of the Bard chatbot right now.

With these capabilities, developers can focus on designing experiences and deploying generative apps fast, without the delays and distractions of implementation minutiae. In this blog post, we’ll explore how your organization can leverage Conversational AI on Gen App Builder to create compelling, AI-powered experiences. In the near future we’ll be adding more posts with interesting examples of what you can do with chatbots, such as linking them to APIs and services, and even tapping into Google AI ML platform. In the meantime, check out some examples of bots that are built in to Hangouts Chat in this recent blog post. Remember that all of this is technically an experiment for now, and you might see some software glitches in your chatbot responses.

Make sure that you’re signed in to the correct Google Account when you open the

Apps Script template. The current account can sometimes switch to

your default account without you noticing. Gemini is also only available in English, though Google plans to roll out support for other languages soon.

I am prompted to either create a new Dialogflow project or connect to an existing one. I’ve already created a Dialogflow project, so I choose to connect to an existing project and then I follow the prompts to set up the authentication between my Business Messages agent and the Dialogflow project. After creating an agent on behalf of a business, the chat button isn’t immediately available to Google Search and Maps users. All agents must go through a verification and launch process before the chat button will be shown for businesses in Search and Maps.

Also, anyone with a Pixel 8 Pro can use a version of Gemini in their AI-suggested text replies with WhatsApp now, and with Gboard in the future. To learn more about Business Messages, check out our developer website and join our community. You can also check out the Business Messages Helper Bot powered by this technology available in our developer support section here. After creating the JSON structure for a card, I click Save and re-enter the chat on my phone asking “Who made this bot? The document can be a URL pointing to an existing FAQ for a business or if you don’t have one, you can create an FAQ using Google Sheets, download it as a CSV, and then upload the CSV to initialize Bot-in-a-Box.

Now with a working dialog, all there is left to do is handle user events once it’s displayed. Again this is similar to how you would handle events working with Cards within Add-ons. Your bot will receive an event that is type CARD_CLICKED with a DialogEventType set to SUBMIT_DIALOG. The actionMethodName value will let you know what element the user clicked to process the request, e.g. ‘assign’ as depicted below. The response includes the formInputs details which are the user provided inputs returned from the dialog, which you can process as your solution needs to.

Chat apps available from Google

When a user asks a question in  Google Chat, the bot that is initiated integrates with Dialogflow to facilitate natural conversations. Dialogflow, in turn, integrates with a backend database or Sheets (as shown in the image) via a Cloud Functions fulfillment. Go to script.google.com, click the “Create Project” button, name your project “Hello ChatBot”, click Save. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to build your first Google Hangouts chatbot using Apps Script. Configuring

your app’s OAuth consent screen defines what is displayed to users and app

reviewers, and registers your app so you can publish it later. Using Gemini inside of Bard is as simple as visiting the website in your browser and logging in.

Building a chatbot that integrates Google Chat, Dialogflow, and Sheets (or another data source) is straightforward. For more details, watch our Integrate Dialogflow with Google Chat video, where we talk in more https://chat.openai.com/ depth about the process, and check out the full source code on GitHub. Chatbots have existed for years, so let’s start by walking through the below video to visualize how generative AI changes the game.

How to Add and Use Bots in Google Chat

For the purposes of this example, I created an FAQ as shown in the document below and uploaded it to Bot-in-a-Box. Even without launching an agent, you can test the message flow by using the test URLs from a mobile device that are autogenerated when you create the agent. The test URLs for an agent can be copied or sent to your email from within the Business Communications Developer Console and are also available as a property of the agent if you’re using the API.

Since Bridgepoint Runners is enabled for Business Messages, I also see a Chat button, which when tapped opens a conversation with Bridgepoint Runners. In the conversation, the business can automatically answer my questions using AI-powered bots as well as live agents. After answering a question about return policies, the assistant recognizes the shopper may be ready for a purchase and asks if it should generate a shopping cart.

As with previous generative AI updates from Google, Gemini is also not available in the European Union—for now. I downloaded this Sheet as a CSV and uploaded it as the initial data set for Bot-in-a-Box to train with. The quickstart will have you deploy code to Google App Engine and the life of a message for your Echo Bot sample will look something like the image below. Once you’ve worked your way through the quickstart, you’ll have registered a Google Cloud Project and that project will have two APIs enabled, the Business Communications API and Business Messages API. Fulfillment is where we glue everything together, connecting all the APIs in a Node.js Firebase function. In this case, we use the Sheets API but you can connect to any backend you choose.

One of the current strengths of Bard is its integration with other Google services, when it actually works. Tag @Gmail in your prompt, for example, to have the chatbot summarize your daily messages, or tag @YouTube to explore topics with videos. Our previous tests of the Bard chatbot showed potential for these integrations, but there are still plenty of kinks to be worked out.

For example, organizations can use prebuilt flows to cover common tasks like authentication, checking an order status, and more. Developers can add these onto a canvas with a single click and complete a basic form to enable them. Developers can also visually map out business logic and include the prebuilt and custom tasks. As a developer, slash commands are straightforward to implement, and daresay essential in offering a better bot experience. In fact, if you have an existing Google Chat bot you’ve built and deployed, it’s likely more than worthwhile to revise your bot to include slash commands in an updated release. Fortunately for those who are in the early stages of learning to build bots for Google Hangouts, the “low code” Google Apps Script environment provides an easy path to get started.

Create a Google Chat app that you can directly message and that

responds by echoing your messages. Now that I have the basics setup, I’m going to click on the Integrations menu item in the developer console and configure Bot-in-a-Box via Dialogflow. To get started, since I’m already registered for Business Messages, I’m going to go to the Business Communications Developer Console and create a new agent. In this article, I’ll give a brief overview of Business Messages, how to get started developing with the platform, and then walkthrough how to set up an AI-powered conversion using the Bot-in-a-Box feature. In the Google Cloud Community, connect with Googlers and other Google Workspace admins like yourself.

After the transfer, the shopper isn’t burdened by needing to get the human up to speed. Gen App Builder includes Agent Assist functionality, which summarizes previous interactions and suggests responses as the shopper continues to ask questions. As a result, the handoff from the AI assistant to the human agent is smooth, and the shopper is able to complete their purchase, having had their concerns efficiently answered.

Google teased that its further improved model, Gemini Ultra, may arrive in 2024, and could initially be available inside an upgraded chatbot called Bard Advanced. No subscription plan has been announced yet, but for comparison, a monthly subscription to ChatGPT Plus with GPT-4 costs $20. From the Integrations section of the Business Communications Developer Console, I click on View agent, which takes me into Dialogflow ES. I click on the Intents menu item, create a new intent called “About this bot”, enter a few training phrases that represent expressions that should match this intent, and a text response.

La redazione

[...]