Keep the dialog flowing—create conversational chatbots in Hangouts Chat with Dialogflow

Last year, we launched our team-based messaging platform, Hangouts Chat, to help teams collaborate more efficiently. At the time, we paired it with a robust API framework to help developers build custom chat bots that can automate tasks for users and connect Chat directly with third-party apps and services they use.

Today, we’re building on this by offering developers a new way to easily build rich, natural conversational experiences in Hangouts Chat using Dialogflow. We are also making it possible to integrate with Hubot, a popular scripting-based platform for task automation, and will be rolling out a new, single destination for users to access bots built for Chat.

Integrating Hangouts Chat with Dialogflow
With Dialogflow, you can create a natural-sounding conversational UI with just a few clicks. Because Dialogflow includes built-in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), your bot can quickly understand and respond to user messages.

Dialogflow makes it easy to add training phrases and responses, as well as have your bot pass on information to other apps and services via custom fulfillments.

Here’s how you can get started:

• Create a new agent in Dialogflow.

• Go to the Integrations page for your agent and enable Hangouts Chat.

• From there, install the bot on your own account and test it in Chat.

Check out our documentation for more specifics.

Introducing the new Hubot adapter for Hangouts Chat
In addition to Dialogflow, Hubot is a great way to build a bot that works on multiple platforms. With the Hangouts Chat Hubot Adapter, you can leverage the vast amount of resources available on Hubot that make it simple to build a bot. Furthermore, you can easily bring your existing Hubot functionalities into Hangouts Chat.

The Hangouts Chat Hubot adapter supports two types of bot endpoints: HTTP and Cloud Pub/Sub. To get started with the Hubot adapter, check out this documentation.

Bringing you more bot choices
As our bot ecosystem continues to grow in Chat, we want to make  it as easy as possible for users to find relevant chat bots. To help, we’re building a catalog natively in Chat that will help people discover and add bots.

The bot catalog features a main page that ranks bots by relevance to the user (according to the number of times it was installed in a room). Each bot option will include detailed descriptions to help users learn more, along with screenshots provided by the bot's developer.

Both the Dialogflow integration for Hangouts Chat and the Hubot adapter are available today, and you’ll start to see the bot catalog in coming months.