Dialogflow went down, Voicify customers Actions stay up

by Voicify Restaurants | Aug 21, 2020 | Brand marketing, Content management, Industry News, Voice technology

Even when Dialogflow experiences outages Voicify customer Actions remain active. It has to do with early architecture decisions we made which are proving valuable.

This week, Google’s Dialogflow was facing outages that caused issues for many Google Actions, chatbots, and other channels. The underlying issues were related to how Dialogflow handles input and output contexts. These contexts are what allow for multi-turn conversations, sub-intents, and tracking of session information within a conversation. For example, a Dialogflow agent could track the name of the user that they were said by allowing the webhook fulfillment to add an output context with the spoken name. Because the context storage was seeing outages, the information the Dialogflow agent and webhooks were passing became lost and thus broke functionality for existing applications.

Although this outage was across the board for all Dialogflow agents, Voicify users did not have any issues with their multi-turn conversations, state management, session info, etc. Although Voicify works directly with Dialogflow to support all the channels/integrations that work with Google, it does not depend on the input and output contexts to store and track information about the conversation/user. Instead, Voicify has its own abstraction over session and user attributes that allow the platform to control conversation context, turn history, and custom attributes that developers choose to add/manage. In conclusion, Voicify apps should be completely unaffected by this outage in Dialogflow.