API.ai Webhooks

Question

I'm trying to create a bot with API.ai and in order to create global parameters and such I need to add a webhook. The doc says I need Google Cloud Project but I need to put billing info which I don't have. Is there any way not to do that or maybe use an alternative webhook option?

Answer 1

You can use Cloud Functions for Firebase as mentioned in the getting started guide without setting up billing, but you can't call non-Google APIs or URLs without setting up billing.

You can also use any other hosting providers (Google's AppEngine, Compute Engine, Amazon's Lambda, EC2, Heroku, Azure, etc.) for fulfilling API.AI agents, as long as you have a server that can respond to a HTTPS request, it'll work with API.AI's webhook fulfillment. To get started you can even use your local machine and tools like ngrok to tunnel the connection from a HTTPS url to your local development machine: https://ngrok.com/

Answer 2

If you're creating a webhook, you need to host it somewhere like on aws/azure/google cloud to consume services through http/https, which will surely start billing you after free services are expired or if you reach to your spending limit. Instead, api.ai (dialogflow) has now an inbuilt inline editor where you can build and manage fulfillment directly & deploy your services to firebase. You can get more details over following link, please refer,

https://dialogflow.com/docs/how-tos/getting-started-fulfillment