Thursday, November 16, 2017 - By Dan Aharon, Product Manager for Cloud AI
From chatbots to IoT devices, conversational apps provide a richer and more natural experience for users. Dialogflow (formerly API.AI) was created for exactly that purpose — to help developers build interfaces that offer engaging, personal interactions.
We’ve seen hundreds of thousands of developers use Dialogflow to create conversational apps for customer service, commerce, productivity, IoT devices and more. Developers have consistently asked us to add enterprise capabilities, which is why today we’re announcing the beta release of Dialogflow Enterprise Edition. The enterprise edition expands on all the benefits of Dialogflow, offering greater flexibility and support to meet the needs of large-scale businesses. In addition, we're also announcing speech integration within Dialogflow, enabling developers to build rich voice-based applications.
Here’s a little more on what Dialogflow offers:
Conversational interaction powered by machine learning: Dialogflow uses natural language processing to build conversational experiences faster and iterate more quickly. Provide a few examples of what a user might say and Dialogflow will build a unique model that can learn what actions to trigger and what data to extract so it provides the most relevant and precise responses to your users.
Build once and deploy everywhere: Use Dialogflow to build a conversational app and deploy it on your website, your app or 32 different platforms, including the Google Assistant and other popular messaging services. Dialogflow also supports multiple languages and multilingual experiences so you can reach users around the world.
Advanced fulfillment options: Fulfillment defines the corresponding action in response to whatever a user says, such as processing an order for a pizza or triggering the right answer to your user's question. Dialogflow allows you to connect to any webhook for fulfillment whether it's hosted in the public cloud or on-premises. Dialogflow’s integrated code editor allows you to code, test and implement these actions directly within Dialogflow's console.
Voice control with speech recognition: Starting today, Dialogflow enables your conversational app to respond to voice commands or voice conversations. It's available within a single API call, combining speech recognition with natural language understanding.
Dialogflow Enterprise Edition also offers:
Google Cloud Platform Terms of Service: Dialogflow Enterprise Edition is covered by the Google Cloud Platform Terms of Service, including the Data Privacy and Security Terms. Enterprise Edition users are also eligible for Cloud Support packages, and the Enterprise Edition will soon provide SLAs with committed availability levels.
Flexibility and scale: Dialogflow Enterprise Edition offers higher default quotas so it’s easier to scale your app up or down based on user demand.
Unlimited pay-as-you-go voice support: While both the standard and enterprise editions now allow your conversational app to detect voice commands or respond to voice conversations, Dialogflow Enterprise Edition offers unlimited pay-as-you-go voice support
Companies such as Uniqlo, Policybazaar.com and Strayer University have already used Dialogflow to design and deploy conversational experiences.
Creating new online shopping experiences for Uniqlo
UNIQLO is a modern Japanese retailer that operates nearly 1,900 stores worldwide. The company integrated a chatbot into its mobile app to provide quick, relevant answers to a range of customer questions, regardless of whether customers are shopping online or in-store. This makes the shopping experience easier and more enjoyable. Since deploying the chatbot, 40% of users have interacted with it on a weekly basis.
“Our shopping chatbot was developed using Dialogflow to offer a new type of shopping experience through a messaging interface, with responses continually being improved through machine learning. Going forward, we’re also looking to expand the functionality to include voice recognition and multiple languages.”
— Shinya Matsuyama, Director of Global Digital Commerce, Uniqlo
Changing the way we buy insurance with Policybazaar.com
Policybazaar.com is the leading insurance marketplace in India, founded in the year 2008, with the purpose of educating consumers, enabling easy comparisons and purchasing insurance products. The company today hosts over 80 million visitors yearly, and records nearly 150,000 transactions a month.
Using Dialogflow Enterprise Edition, Policybazaar.com created and deployed a conversational assisted chatbot, PBee, to better serve its visitors and transform the way customers purchase insurance online. The company has been using the logging and training module to track top customer requests and improve fulfillment capabilities. In just a few months, PBee now handles over 60% of customer queries over chat, resulting in faster fulfillment of requests from its users.
Since deploying the chatbot, the company has seen a five-fold increase in customers using their chat interface for auto insurance, and chat now contributes to 40% of the company's auto insurance sales.
“Dialogflow is by far the best platform for text-based conversational chatbots. With it, we derive all the benefits of machine learning without restrictions on the frontend. Through our chatbot, we are now closing over 13,000 sales totaling a premium of nearly $2 million (USD) every month and growing at a 30% month-over-month rate.”
— Ashish Gupta, CTO & CPO, Policybazaar.com