According to Gartner, this is the year that 50% of the enterprises will spend more money on bot development than traditional mobile app development! At Google, we have made a similar observation. Through Google Cloud, we work a lot with enterprise customers, we get lots of questions about our conversational AI tools for building chatbots and voice bots, and we help companies build these. This includes bots for the apparent channels such as websites, iOS, Android mobile apps, and social media like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Slack, Whatsapp, Line etc. but also: building virtual agents in contact centers!

Dialogflow recently had a name change; it’s now called Dialogflow Essentials (Dialogflow ES) to make room for a new Google Cloud Conversational AI tool: Dialogflow Customer Experience (Dialogflow CX). Dialogflow CX will be an alternative development suite for building conversational UIs and will exist next Dialogflow ES. Google will continue to support Dialogflow ES, as we have a huge user base. To understand why Google created another bot builder, let’s first understand how Dialogflow ES works.