FAQs are typically text-based, with questions and their answers. The questions most frequently posed to companies by their customers are usually posted, along with the company's answers, on the company website or mobile application, in the help page section, for other customers to be able to search through them. Sometimes, the company provides a search function on the website, allowing customers to type in keywords related to their questions, which displays the answers as search results. However, none of the preceding methods can compete with the speed and efficiency voice-enabled FAQs can provide. For example, take a look at a typical FAQs section in the GEICO insurance mobile application, which is shown in the following screenshot. There are 11 categories, and there are between 2 to 12 questions per category. It would take a long time for customers...

Here's a brief history of Dialogflow. In 2012, Speaktoit received venture capital to create a platform for building natural language user interfaces. In 2014, Speaktoit released Api.ai, allowing developers to build voice user interfaces for Android, iOS, HTML5, and Cordova (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogflow). In 2016, Google acquired Api.ai and in 2017, Api.ai was rebranded to Dialogflow. Since then, Dialogflow has continued to add new features at lightning speed in order to compete with the counterpart technology of Amazon's Alexa. Dialogflow's strength lies in its ability to perform natural language processing through the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the core engine behind creating voice user interfaces. As a developer, you will never have to worry about the complexity of natural language processing, machine...

For the FAQs chatbot, I will choose the Presidents of the USA as a topic. I will gather various fun facts about U.S. Presidents from https://millercenter.org/president and turn them into questions and answers that the user can ask the FAQs chatbot. Later, in the following section where you create your first intent, you will learn how to build templates to generalize user questions for the FAQs in order to create intents.

The following are sample facts about the first U.S. President, George Washington:

{
    "fullName": "George Washington",
    "birthDate": "February 22, 1732",
    "dateDate": "December 14, 1799",
    "birthPlace": "Pope’s Creek, Virginia",
    "education": "The equivalent of an elementary school education",
    "religion": &quot...

Google Assistant is a platform where you can create and deploy voice-enabled applications. Google Assistant is available on all Android 6.0 devices or higher, including mobile phones, tablets, Google Home, and Google Auto. For all new Android devices, Google Assistant comes pre-installed. In this section, you will learn how to deploy and test FaqChatBot on your iPhone or Android phones.

Follow the Google instructions on installing Google Assistant on your iPhone or Android device at http://bit.ly/2sEKMXS. After installing Google Assistant, link your Google account that you used to set up your Dialogflow account to Google Assistant. First, open Google...

Processing human conversation into something that machines can understand is challenging. Even today, with all the technology that's available, natural language processing is still a big challenge. Google has been in the business of natural language processing since day one, through Google Search. Google Search is all about natural language processing, where keywords or phrases are converted into meaningful machine-understandable forms, and then the backend server returns search query results to the user. Similarly, Dialogflow takes care of all the complexities of machine learning behind the scenes to process natural language and even add artificial intelligence to train data so that machines can become smarter over time. For example, whenever a user speaks, their voice is transcribed and then processed by Dialogflow and then matched against...

In this chapter, you learned about Google's natural language processing platform and applied it to building voice user interfaces for FaqChatBot. Then, you learned how to configure and deploy to Google Assistant on iPhone or Android. Finally, you learned how to tweak machine learning configuration in Dialogflow, and also how to train data to make the Dialogflow agent smarter.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to build voice-enabled applications using a built-in Node.js server in Dialogflow. You will also learn about new Dialogflow features, such as webhooks and fulfillment, and more advanced topics on context and entities will be introduced.