Tag Archives: api.ai

Chrome

Actions On Google – GDD Europe

krakow from the GDD eventGoogle Developer Days (GDD) are global events showcasing the latest developer products and platforms from Google. It’s like Google I/O but not in California. It was a fun event and we had the chance to meet many developers and talk about interesting challenges and opportunities.

We just finished this talk on “Actions on Google – Why? What?” at Google Developer Summit and you can find the slides and the video recording below.

 

 

Like with any new platform, the first question you might have is why?
In this case, it will be something like “Why do I need an assistant app? I already have a native and a mobile app”, right?

Here are few points to keep in mind:

Continue reading →

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bots

Natural Language Processing Tools

The powerful thing we got these days is the option to choose the best tool for the job. When it comes to building our new Google Assistant App or any other type of bot, we should use a natural language processing (NLP) tool.

Here are the tools I found for NLP:

  • API.AI – This tool give users new ways to interact with your product by building engaging voice and text-based conversational apps. It also use machine learning to understand what users are saying (NLP) and it got a very nice set of integration you can leverage. You can deploy your bot to: Google Assistant, Telegram, Slack, Twitter, Skype, Viber, Kik, Cortana, Alexa and Facebook Messenger.

Continue reading →

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Resources For Action On Google Developers

Here is a list of good resources you can use if you are building a new assistant app or any other Action on Google.
If you love to jump into code and try it for yourself, jump to the code labs section below or just browse (and clone) our samples on Github.

Google Home and Google Assistant Google Home

Google Assistant
Videos about Conversation Actions Building Assistant Actions using API.AI

Introduction to Conversation Actions and building your first assistant app
Documentation and tools Actions on Google documentation

Resources for designers and how to improve you voice design

API.AI – Start with this tool that will save you a lot of work with its NLP capabilities.

Web simulator – When it’s time to test your new app, this simulator will help you a lot. It’s easy to use it and you can try to talk (and not just type) to it and see what will be the results in the real world.

Code samples – You can take some ideas and best practices from these examples.
Ask Questions Stack Overflow (actions-on-google) – We have a great community in Stack Overflow. They are true expert and it’s a great place to ask for help.

Actions on Google Developers G+ Community – This is a growing community (~3k members).
You can share knowledge and keep yourself updated on the rapid changes we see in this technology platform.

@actionsongoogle – Yes! We are on twitter as well. Please don’t be a stranger.
Code labs https://bit.ly/aog-bitcoin-codelab – A code lab that will show you how to leverage API.AI and your own servers (with web hooks). You can also try the code.

https://bit.ly/aog-animal-codelab – A code lab that is short and sweet and as a bonus you might find some good jokes.

https://codelabs.developers.google.com/?cat=Assistant
Samples Actions on Google at GitHub with lots of NodeJS examples.

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How To Improve Your Conversation Design?

We’re entering a promising new era of computing, where advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence are creating a resurgence of interest in voice interfaces and natural language processing.

It’s a new way to talk with your users.

For real.

Thus, we need to think on the voice user interface from the start and see how we can do a better job.

In this post, we will go over some of the most common challenges and how to overcome them.

Continue reading →

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Google #IO17 – Actions On Google

The past 3 days were packed with developers, sessions, announcements and good weather at Shoreline.

Here are some of the things that I really liked (and marked myself to try later):

What is new with the Google Assistant.

You can learn why actions on google is great option for developers and what you can do with it in your own hardware.

How to build apps for the Google Assistant

The Google Assistant’s mission is to help users get things done in their world.

This video below will explain how to plug into the Google Assistant services ecosystem. It covers everything from understanding the business use case and high level user interface design to implementation and growing usage. Continue reading →

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look carefully
bots

Integrate Your API.AI Bot With Slack

It’s really easy and powerful to work with API.AI as a tool for creating your bots. Not only you are getting a powerful machine learning algorithm to understand your users, you get in the same time an easy way to integrate with many services (e.g. Google Home, Twitter, Facebook messenger, Slack, Telegram, Skype and many more).

What is API.AI?

API.AI is a natural language understanding platform that makes it easy for developers to design and integrate intelligent and sophisticated conversational user interfaces into mobile apps, web applications, devices, and bots.
If you never worked with API.AI – You can check it out in this post.

What is Slack?

I just copied from this site, because it’s short and to the point:

Where work* happens.

*Whatever work means for you, Slack brings all the pieces and people you need together so you can actually get things done.
If you are a developer that worked with IRC in the past – Slack is a (much) ‘nicer’ version of it. You get the productivity of a mobile chat tool with many options for integrations and automations.

Now, that we got the tools defined, let’s see how to integrate API.AI and Slack in nine elegant ‘dance movements’. Continue reading →

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bots, JavaScript

Build Your First Smart Bot For Google Home

In the past few months, I heard someone smart saying that “the future is artificial intelligence first”.

Artificial intelligence, is making computers “smart” so they can think on their own and be even more helpful for us. It’s clear that Google, has been investing heavily in the areas of:

  • Machine learning – Teaching computers how to see patterns in data and act on it.
  • Speech recognition and Language understanding – Meaning, being able to understand you when you are talking with all the little differences and nuance.

These days we can see it all come together in the Google Assistant. It allows you to have a conversation with Google and be more productive. In this post, we will see how it’s all working by building a new Action for Google home. In the same time, we will have a nice bot that in the future we will integrate with many apps. Cool? Continue reading →

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