Building Actions for Google Assistant

Slides for the talk at Google Developer Group New Delhi as a part of India Builds Actions initiative by Google.

Don’t you hate when your Google Assistant replies, “I don’t know that yet” or "I can't help you with that right now." Ever wondered if you could solve this problem and extend its functionality by building your own Actions? Wouldn’t you like to publish your Actions on the Google Assistant marketplace and have everyone use it?
Google Assistant is quickly becoming the default voice assistant in a variety of hardware platforms ranging from smart speakers to smart home devices. Its functionality can be extended by building custom Actions for your specific use case.
In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn all about Actions on Google, how to build your own custom Actions, test and publish them on the Google Assistant marketplace. You’ll also learn how to design great conversations using Dialogflow and integrate it into your Actions.

Transcript

1. Building Actions for Google Assistant
2. Hello! I am Alkesh Srivastava I am here to help you build Actions for the Google Assistant You can find me at @_alkesh_ or alkeshsrivastava.com
3. 1. What is Actions on Google?
4. What is Actions on Google? Actions on Google is a program run by Google that allows developers to extend the functionalities of Google Assistant by building Actions
5. Actions are basically apps for the Google Assistant platform What are “Actions”?
7. How do Actions work?
10. By building Actions, you can leverage the voice platform for your services What is the use of Actions?
11. 11 Great !
12. 12 But how do I begin?
13. 2. How to build your own Actions?
14. Building your own Actions Design Develop Deploy
15. Design 1. Create a persona 2. Draft a conversation 3. Understand context 4. Speech errors
16. Develop 1. Create a Dialogflow agent 2. Define entities and intents 3. Define user phrases 4. Define actions and responses 5. Connect webhook
17. Deploy 1. Register your Action 2. Test your Action 3. Review publishing checklist 4. Publish your Action
18. 2. Design
19. GUI != VUI 19
20. The design process Identify key use case Focus on user persona Role play the conversation Use TTS or SSML to render the dialogs
21. SSML? 21
22. Speech Synthesis Markup Language If you want to build a great voice experience, you’ve got to use SSML
24. ‘’ There are no “errors” in a conversation
25. 4. Develop
26. Agent An agent is a natural language understanding module used to transform natural user requests into actionable data
27. Intent An intent represents a mapping between what a user says and what action should be taken by your software.
28. Parameters Parameters are values that we are trying to extract from the user phrases
29. Entities Entities are powerful tools used for extracting parameter values from natural language inputs.
30. Fulfillment Dialogflow allows you to setup a webhook which passes the information to a web service and receives a result from it
31. 31 Too much info?
32. 32 Let’s have a quick Demo
33. 5. Deploy
34. Register your Action Before submitting you must provide the metadata for your Action, like trigger phrase, invocation name etc.
36. Test your Action
37. Avoid some common pitfalls No response and no leads Incomplete store listing data Naming, directory listing and pronunciation
38. 38 Talk to Bitcoin info Can I speak to Bitcoin info Ask Bitcoin info Do’s Don’ts Ask Bitcoin info
39. 39 Can I speak to Bitcoin info Do’s Don’ts Talk to crypto Talk to bitcoin Talk to ethereum
40. Publish
41. 41 That’s it
42. 42 No seriously, that’s it
43. 43 And last but not the least,
44. 44 !=
45. 45 Let’s code!
46. 46 Congratulations! You have just published your first Action!
47. 47 What’s next?
48. 6. Developer Community program
49. Developer Community Program Get $200 monthly Google Cloud credit and an Assistant t-shirt when you publish your first app Receive a Google Home device when you reach specific milestones
50. Some of the resources to follow https://developers.google.com/actions/ https://twitter.com/actionsongoogle https://codelabs.developers.google.com/co delabs/actions-1/#0
51. Thanks! Any questions? You can find me at - @_alkesh_ alkeshsrivastava.com