Google Assistant - Dynamic entities

Question

We've recently had to pause our in-depth development with Alexa Skills,due to their Dynamic entities not being completey ready for the use case it was intended for (had confirmation direct from an AWS architect).

Documentation of same:

• https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/use-dynamic-entities-for-customized-interactions.html
• https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/db4c0ed5-5a05-4037-a3a7-3fe5c29dcb65/use-dynamic-entities-to-create-personalized-voice-experiences

Regardless, we've since been making a POC for Google Assistant, as have heard of their equivalent ( Dialogflow dynamic enity ).

The problem we having is that this too doesn't seem to be loading data dynamically.

Our expected result is to; load data (dynamically), into a new slot that would be used during the action.

• ie load a list of specific names at runtime, that can then be used for lookup while using the app.

Creating a new static lookup slot (within the console) with ±5 set names (unique and not common) work fine and everytime, however, as soon as you load those names dynamically, they are not recognized when spoken.

We've seen similar issues that all seem to be resolved, using POST calls to DialogFlow, however, we are unable to replicate this in a runtime environment.

• Dialogflow dynamic enity issue

Has anyone had similar issues with this and managed to get it working as expected?

If so, would you mind please sharing some additional documentation that could help with an example of same? I suspect we are really close but are missing something simple.

PS - I have not pasted example code here deliberately, as I am after documentation and examples of same, I'd rather not confuse the topic - unless required.

Answer 1

Dialogflow refers to these as session entities , since they are Entity Types that contain values that you set during a session, and that only maintain those values for that user during that session.

You can access them using a REST endpoint for the session entity types, or use one of the client libraries that can provide access.

However...

While this has worked fine in the past there seem to be some problems currently with Session Entities. (That SO question does provide some code and examples, so you may want to take a look at it anyway in case it does work for you.) This is opened as a bug in their issue tracker, but there has been no public acknowledgement from Google about it.