My buddy Wassim and I were back on stage together to talk about chatbots, with Actions on Google and Dialogflow, at DevFest Lille and Best of Web Paris. I’d like to share with you the slides of the presentation (the video has been recorded and will be available at a later time.)
You might be interested in those two codelabs to get started on this journey:
Here’s the presentation given at DevFest Lille:
Read more...ServerlessConf Paris is in full swing this week, and I had the chance yesterday to participate in a workshop with my colleague Frank, to cover building apps for voice, chat, web and mobile, using Google’s serverless solutions. In particular, for voice & chat, I spoke about Dialogflow and Google Assistant / Actions on Google, using Cloud Functions for my business logic, while in the afternoon we covered Firebase un more depth.
If you want to have a quick look at the deck, here are the slides that I presented:
Read more...Today, there were some interesting announcements for Actions on Google, for building your conversational interfaces for the Google Assistant. Among the great news, one item particularly caught my attention: the improved SSML support:
Better SSML: We recently rolled out an update to the web simulator which includes a new SSML audio design experience. We now give you more options for creating natural, quality dialog using newly supported SSML tags, including <prosody>, <emphasis>, <audio> and others. The new tag <par> is coming soon and lets you add mood and richness, so you can play background music and ambient sounds while a user is having a conversation with your app. To help you get started, we’ve added over 1,000 sounds to the sound library. Listen to a brief SSML audio experiment that shows off some of the new features here.
Read more...
A few weeks ago, my buddy Wassim and I had the chance to present again on the topic of chatbots, with API.AI and Cloud Functions, at the DevFest Toulouse conference.
Here’s the latest update to our slide deck:
There’s also a video (in French) of the same content from Devoxx France, where I was showing how to build a conference chatbot:
Chatbots, per se, are not really new, in the sense that we’ve been developing bots for things like IRC for a long time, but back in the day, it was simply some regular expression labor of love, rather than the natural language that we use today. The progress in machine learning, in both speech recognition (for when you use devices like Google Home) and natural language understanding (NLU), is what led us to being able to speak and chat naturally to those chatbots we encounter now.
Read more...You know what? It’s Pi Day today! Well, if you follow the American date standard, it’s 3.14 today, a nice approximation of Pi. Last year, in a past life, I had played with Pi already, but this year, my awesome colleagues (Ray, Sandeep, Francesc, Ian) have been working on some very cool demos around Pi, with the “Pi delivery”, at https://pi.delivery/
You can transform the Pi digits in a nice melody, show a D3.js based visualisation of the transitions between digits, you can stream the Pi digits, and more. And you can learn about how it’s been developed on the Google Cloud Platform.
Read more...Last week, in San Francisco, took place the Google Cloud Next 2017 conference, and I had the pleasure to co-present a session on “Extending the Google Assistant with Actions on Google”, with Brad Abrams, product manager on the assistant technology at Google.
The Google Assistant is the conversational user interface that helps you get things done in your world. Actions on Google let you build on this assistance, while your integrations can help you engage users through Google Home on Pixel, Android and many other devices that connect with Google Assistant. In this session, we’ll share the latest innovations behind the Google Assistant and how you can leverage those technologies and best practices for Voice User Interface design to build your own custom extensions to Google Assistant.
Read more...