Dialogflow: reference to output context in intent (ie what's this NodeJS Client Library for?)

Question

In my NodeJS Dialogflow fulfillment, I want to reference an output context parameter from an intent from 2 requests ago within the session.

The queryResult of the latest request doesn't have that data. And the samples only seem to process WebhookRequest and WebhookResponse (
reference: https://dialogflow.com/docs/reference/api-v2/rest/v2beta1/WebhookResponse )

If I can access https://dialogflow.com/docs/reference/api-v2/rest/v2beta1/projects.agent.sessions.contexts/get I may be able to do it. But I don't quite understand if that implies mixing https://github.com/dialogflow/fulfillment-webhook-nodejs/blob/master/functions/index.js with this Client Library: https://github.com/googleapis/nodejs-language .

In other words, it's not clear to me what the purpose of https://github.com/googleapis/nodejs-language is. Is nodejs-language intended to substitute actions-on-google fulfillments (in the format of https://github.com/dialogflow/fulfillment-webhook-nodejs/blob/master/functions/index.js ) ?

Answer 1

There is a lot going on here, and it isn't quite clear why you think things fit together the way you do.

The nodejs-language library is used to access Google's Natural Language API that runs as part of the Google Cloud Machine Learning API family. This is a completely separate product from the Google Assistant, Actions on Google, and Dialogflow systems. It is meant as an API for people who are looking for a pre-trained AI that can do things like sentiment and syntax analysis. It is not meant as a substitute for any part of the AoG or Dialogflow platform.

As long as the context set two requests ago was set with a lifetime more than 2, and wasn't cleared in between, then it still should be valid and sent to your fulfillment webhook. Since it sounds like you're using Dialogflow V2, you should be able to get all the currently valid contexts as part of the request that is sent to your fulfillment webhook by looking at the queryResult.contexts object in the request body.

If you're using the fulfillment-webhook-nodejs library that you referenced in your post, this should be available to you in the inputContexts variable.