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I am trying to wrap my head around using Dialogflow for developing and integrating an SMS chatbot with our custom CRM. The creation of an Intent is pretty powerful and straight forward. However, I am trying to understand best practices for something. If I have an intent used to return the price of a service at a certain location, I can model that very easily within dialog flow. However, when an SMS message comes in, it will be from a new customer or a known existing customer for a certain location. For existing customers, we already know the location and therefore don't want them to have to specify the location value in the intent. Prior to sending the inbound SMS message to the client API to match the intent, how can I pre-set the "location" parameter value in the intent so it does exists even if that inbound SMS message did not include it? For example a known customer in Dallas would just have to say "how much is a xxx" instead of "how much is a xxx in Dallas".

Can you use the API to set a parameter value prior to calling the API to try and match the intent? If so, how do you get do that without a session ID? The reason the "location" is needed is because when we get to the fulfillment, the prices for the same service are different based on the location so I will need to be known but we don't want to make existing customers say the location.

Maybe another option is to have a Location intent with an event that we can trigger through the API. this would have an output context on it called location and fulfillment that sets the parameter value. But even then I struggle with understanding how to pass in values like location, phone number, etc into dialogflow from the calling application so dialogflow has those parameter values to use in fulfillment.

Reading documentation, watching videos and starting to test client API v2

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1 Answers

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This is certainly possible. What you would want to do is use the Dialogflow API for this. Here you can find the languages for which Google has created client libraries: https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow/docs/reference/libraries/overview

As soon as you have any 'if' in your code you should use the fulfillment: https://dialogflow.com/docs/fulfillment

How I would handle this:

  • Client sends SMS
  • You check in your back-end if this user is known. If known -> don't ask location, else you ask the location
  • Match the user query against the Dialogflow client library
  • Dialogflow will return the intent if (any) is matched

You should define and implement any logic before calling the Dialogflow library.