Voice Agents in 20 Minutes with Restcomm and Dialogflow

Dialogflow is a Google-owned developer tool for human to computer interaction based on natural language conversations. Dialogflow is closely related to Google Assistant, a virtual buddy for smartphones that performs tasks and answers user questions in a natural language.

Build Natural and Rich Conversational Experiences

Dialogflow gives users new ways to interact with your product by building engaging voice and text-based conversational interfaces, such as voice apps and chatbots, powered by AI. You can connect with users on your website, mobile app, the Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Facebook Messenger, and other popular platforms and devices.

What is Restcomm?

Restcomm is a communications platform as a service (CPaaS) enablement solution by Telestax. It provides a developer-friendly RESTful application programming interface (API) and a no-code visual designer to build real-time voice and messaging applications.

In this tutorial you will learn how easy it is to build an IVR application powered by AI using Dialogflow and Restcomm Cloud.

Building an Automated Banking IVR Application

What we’re building today is an automated banking IVR application with automatic speech recognition (ASR) powered by Restcomm Cloud and Google’s machine learning AI (Dialogflow).

This Dialogflow agent connected to the Restcomm voice application allows clients to check their bank account balance, make payments, and transfer money between accounts.

Usage Examples:

To exemplify how this process can be implemented, I have divided the architecture into the following components:

• Dialogflow Account Setup
• Restcomm Cloud Account
• Restcomm Dialogflow Sample App

Dialogflow and Google Setup:

Follow the step-by-step instructions here to set up Dialogflow and clone the quick start Restcomm Dialogflow App. Once you have set up the sample app on your web server of choice, you’re only a couple of steps away from completing the SMS bot by pointing a Virtual Number to the sample app URL.

Restcomm Setup

Create a voice RVD application on Restcomm Cloud

2. Choose application type.

3. Provide a description to your newly created Restcomm Application “e.g Dialogflow.”

4 . In this step we will configure the application to send the results (captured by automatic speech recognition) to the Restcomm Dialogflow App. Once a response is received from Dialogflow, we will forward it to the user with text to speech (TTS).

The Service URL is where we have installed the Restcomm Dialogflow App, and the parameter input contains the captured speech recognition results. We will also setup and configure the HTTP Headers Authorization Parameter which is required to authenticate the request with the Restcomm Dialogflow App.

Now we will just repeat the same steps: Capture the speech, send it to Dialogflow, and wait until the flow is finished for a response.

5. Register a phone number on Restcomm.

6. Save and link a Restcomm phone number to the RVD application we created in previous steps.

7. Link the phone number to the application.

8. Test the application by calling +13022235014, and follow IVR instructions using just your voice and Restcomm + Dialogflow will do the rest.

The Opportunity

Communications service providers that are CPaaS-enabled by Restcomm can take this sample to demonstrate how CPaaS can help the banking industry to easily add AI and ML to their voice communication channel.

Dialogflow comes with many pre-built agents from hotel booking to coffee ordering, as well as simple web search. You can take those sample AI-powered apps and connect to any IVR or SMS flow on Restcomm Cloud.

If you’re interested in learning how to enable SMS with Dialogflow. check out our Dialogflow SMS Bot blog post.

If you have any inquiries on the Dialogflow and Restcomm integration do not hesitate to reach out to us at info@telestax.com.