Six new features in Dialogflow CX

Private network access to Webhook targets

Dialogflow now integrates with Service Directory private network access so it can connect to webhook targets inside our customers’ VPC network. This keeps the traffic within the Google Cloud network and enforces IAM and VPC Service Controls for enterprise security.

Learn more about setting this up in our Dialogflow CX documentation.

Search Everywhere

Wondering how to navigate through hundreds of intents, thousands of training phrases? Dialogflow CX’s new global search functionality enables users to search, filter and access resources like pages, intents, training phrases, entity types, webhooks, route groups and more. One can easily search relevant resources using the ‘resource type’ filter while searching.

Search results can further be narrowed down by clicking on the ‘Search Options’ icon. This allows users to specify a criteria for filtering search results. For instance, users can search for intents containing a certain training phrase, routes referencing a certain intent and more.

Continuous Tests and Deployment

Building an enterprise-grade bot often involves intensive QA (Quality Assurance) and deployment processes, which can lead to a lot of manual work. The CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) feature in Dialogflow CX aims to assist bot developers with new tools to manage their bot release cycles.

Using this feature, one can automatically run a set of test cases configured for an environment to verify the intended behavior of the agent in that environment. Users can also use the continuous deployment setting to run verification tests before deploying a flow version to the environment to prevent unintended behaviors and minimize errors.

System functions

Dialogflow now has supported system functions that can execute common arithmetic, string manipulation, conditional and date/time operations. This will save our users the extra effort to write code for these operations, thus improving efficiency. This is also a step towards centralization of business logic of the bot, reducing dependency on webhooks. Customers can apply these inline system functions in their agent’s conditions and fulfillments (such as text responses, conditional responses and parameter presets) to generate dynamic values during conversations.

Here’s an example: