To kick things off, let's briefly talk about the differences between Dialogflow ES (Essentials) and CX. This is to make sure you've chosen the right tool for your job. If you've already done your research and are fully ready to get started with CX, you can safely skip this chapter.

Technical differences

If you've used Dialogflow ES before, I recommend that you watch this video as a quick intro into the technical differences (if you haven't used Dialogflow ES, it's best to jump to the next paragraph):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfgn9iA1KMk

The Difference Between Dialogflow ES and CX

• Dialogflow ES and CX are both built on the same powerful natural language technology, but...
• Dialogflow CX allows much more complex use cases through powerful tools, such as flows, route groups; it also has a visual flow builder that helps in keeping the overview as your dialogues grow more complex
• it's easier to maintain and improve complex bots in Dialogflow CX through infrastructure tools such as versioning, testing, environments
• Dialogflow CX has a steeper learning curve because of the added complexities of the aforementioned tools
• Dialogflow CX is also more expensive than ES; however, the difference is not as big anoymore as mentioned in my video above (in case you watched it); there was a new pricing model released in September 2021 which I think will do good things for the adoption of Dialogflow CX as it seems much more reasonable; the price for a text message request in ES is now $0.002 while in CX it's $0.007; more information on pricing can be found in the official documentation here

<aside> 🧑‍💻 Programming Newbie Aside

• What do those fractional prices mean? </aside>

You can find another detailed comparison of features between ES & CX in the official documentation here.

How Much Do I Have to Pay For CX While Learning It?

The most pressing question for you as a learner might now be how deep you have to reach into your pocket to learn Dialogflow CX. The answer is: Most likely nothing!

First of all, while you set up your bot and test it in the test console (see image below) you are not paying anything. This is what we will be doing for most of this course, so you don't have to worry about costs there...

Additionally, at the moment of using Dialogflow CX for the first time, you will receive $600 of free credit to try out Dialogflow. This credit is valid for 12 months and should be more than enough to learn CX and even to try out some production deployments and real life use cases without having to pay a dime 💪.

<aside> 🧑‍💻 Programming Newbie Aside

• Production deployments you said?? </aside>

When to Use Dialogflow CX

To summarize, it's best to use Dialogflow CX when you are working on very complex use cases (and when you have the money to pay for it 😉). In this course we won't build a super complex chatbot yet. You could certainly build the bot in Dialogflow ES, but it would be slightly harder. And in this course you'll learn about the powerful tools that CX has which will enable you to build complex use cases at a later point.