My name is Peter Fessel, I'm a software developer and product manager. I started working with Dialogflow ES in 2018 when I tried to build a chatbot product with it. I noticed that the technology was very powerful and exciting, yet there were very few resources online to learn it. So I decided to start my own series of Youtube tutorials. I wanted to share what I'd learned so that others could have an easier time learning Dialogflow. My wish was that others wouldn't have to spend as many hours digging for information as I did.
I enjoyed pushing the boundaries of what was possible with Dialogflow and in 2019 I launched a video series on how to build a an advanced ecommerce chatbot. Why advanced you ask? Well, the bot was following the classic example of ordering pizza, but it had many more features and conversation routes than any of the examples I could find in other tutorials. Alongside the video series I started selling a template for the bot for others to see how it was built, as an educational resource.
While I was building this ecommerce bot, I quickly ran into many of the limitations of Dialogflow ES. As soon as the bot hit a certain level of complexity, things became very difficult to manage. This showed me that while the natural language capabilities of ES were powerful, it just wasn't built for scaling to a complex conversation. The conversation even started behaving in unpredictable ways.
Enter Dialogflow CX. In 2020 a banner started showing in the Dialogflow ES interface, advertising for the new CX. It took me a while until I really took the time to look into it, but as soon as I did, I was smitten by its capabilities. The Dialogflow team had obviously done their homework and had created a completely new chatbot creation tool with lots of new ways to do things that were tackling the issues in ES. In short, CX has many tools that make creating complex bots more manageable (more on that in the next chapter).
Now it's the end of 2021 and I can see the same phenomenon that I saw when Dialogflow ES was still new: We have a very powerful, new technology and very few resources to learn it. Something needed to be done and in short, that's why I created the course 😉.
The course is for both total newbies to Dialogflow and for people who have used Dialogflow ES. Whenever helpful, I point out differences between Dialogflow CX and ES to support your learning. If you've never used Dialogflow ES, then you can safely skip these notes, which will look like this:
<aside> 🧩 Differences to Dialogflow ES Aside
The course is also both for people with previous programming knowledge and for people without any knowledge of coding. You might be a software developer, or you might be a UX designer who just took a class in conversation design and now wants to learn some of the technical skills to design conversations in Dialogflow CX yourself. Or you might be a researcher writing your thesis about the possibilities of conversational interfaces and or NLP (natural language processing).
Whenever necessary, I give additional introductions to programming concepts to make sure that everyone can follow along. These asides can of course be skipped by experienced programmers.
<aside> 🧑💻 Programming Newbie Aside
Yep, this puppy is here to stay. I had originally added it as a placeholder image to the first page of the course. Then I added a caption as a joke. Then I kind of liked it and I thought: What if the puppy could speak and act as a facilitator of learner engagement throughout the course? So I added some speech bubbles and here we are. We'll have more encounters with the puppy during the upcoming chapters.
I hear ya, puppy... I think courses where you just watch a bunch of videos or only read about things are pretty boring, too. More than that, adult learning theory says that learning outcomes will be better if the learning happens while solving a practical problem.
Said and done. I included a challenge for you at the end of most chapters (basically in all the chapters where there is something new to practice). Before the challenge, I will oftentimes only give you minimal input into the theory of the topic we are covering. Then I'll throw you right into the deep end, you will get to try it yourself, and you’ll do much of the learning while working practically with Dialogflow.
For the case that you get stuck, I included all sorts of hints that should help you finish the challenge. You can also download all the solutions and import them into Dialogflow to inspect exactly how I implemented the solutions.