Google Assistant - existing dialogflow intents & new actions cooperation

Question

I have a technical question about the Google Assistant - unfortunately, I couldn't find a clear answer anywhere.

At the moment our company have:

1. the conversational chatbot built on Dialogflow, which is constantly developed by our employees
2. Google Actions agent. Our developers managed to construct the connection of the Google account and our client's account on our platform using OAuth 2.0 and created the first actions that, by the exchange of tokens, allow the return of certain information from our platform to the Google Assistant and vice versa - providing certain information in the Google Assistant that are sent and saved in the customer's account on our platform.

We would like both actions on actions.google.com (2) and conversations on Dialogflow (1) to cooperate with each other in the Google Assistant. One team is working on the chatbot, and the other on advanced actions, and we would like it to stay that way.

My question is - is the absolute only way to finally publish it on the google assistant is to migrate the chatbot from Dialogflow to Actions Builder and stop using Dialogflow ? Or maybe there is a simpler solution where both these environments (of course woring on one profile / agent) cooperate with each other and it will be possible to continue working on dialogflow? We understand the advantages of Action Builder, but Dialogflow is just good enough for our needs.

Answer 1

There are a few angles to how you can approach this, depending on your exact needs and limitations you may accept, but the general answer is "yes, you can do both at the same time".

First, Dialogflow ES continues to support the Actions on Google Integration. Just as your Dialogflow agent integrates with other platforms, it should still be able to integrate with Actions.

There are some caveats (and some upsides,) with this: however:

• You'll be using the Actions on Google v2 platform, rather than the v3 that comes with the Action Builder (and newer SDK). If the features you need are supported on v2, then you're fine. (Account Linking is supported in v2.) But if you need some of the features in v3, then you will run into problems.
• You can't have used the Action Builder on the same Cloud project, and you should start the integration from the Dialogflow side. (But once you do - you'll be able to use the Actions Console to do things such as submit it for review, etc.)
• Make sure you do not "upgrade" from Dialogflow to Actions Builder. This severs the two, so you won't be able to update the Action from Dialogflow.

Another approach is that you can use Action Builder, but have it forward all (or nearly all) of the requests to Dialogflow. Under this scheme, you would have an Action Builder project that has as little as one Scene with an Intent that captures all input, sends that to a webhook you control, which sends it to your Dialogflow agent via the Dialogflow API, gets the response from your Dialogflow agent, and forwards that response through Action Builder.

This is a little more complicated, but may offer some benefits if you want to take advantage of more advanced Action concepts that may not be available using v2.