Meet your Google Assistant. Ask it questions. Tell it to do things. It’s your own personal Google, always ready to help. This session will go through Google Assistant features, how to use, and how can we develop for it too. We'll have real demo on some of Google devices that supports Assistant, and will explore both easy and advanced ways to develop real world voice commands and actions for it. You're free to use these slides in your talks, I'd appreciate giving credits though - https://goo.gl/5swDc4

1. Building Conversational Experiences
for Google Assistant ‘18
Abdelrahman Omran | Rinvex | @Omranic | me@omranic.com

2. Be excellent to each other.
Treat everyone with respect. Participate while
acknowledging that everyone deserves to be here — and
each of us has the right to enjoy our experience without fear
of harassment, discrimination, or condescension, whether
blatant or via micro-aggressions. Jokes shouldn’t demean
others. Consider what you are saying and how it would feel
if it were said to or about you.
Practice saying "Yes and" to each other.
It’s a theatre improv technique to build on each other’s
ideas. We all benefit when we create together.
Speak up if you see or hear something.
Harassment is not tolerated, and you are empowered
to politely engage when you or others are
disrespected. The person making you feel
uncomfortable may not be aware of what they are
doing, and politely bringing their behavior to their
attention is encouraged.
In case you see or hear something or feel
uncomfortable, reach out to dev-mena@google.com
Code of Conduct

4. Ready to
help across
500M+ devices

5. A growing audience:
devices

6. JapaneseGerman
FR French
CA French
KoreanUK English
AU English
CA English
US English
Italian
Spanish BR Portuguese
LATAM Spanish
Hindi & IN English
A growing audience:
languages
Swedish
Danish
Norwegian Indonesian
Russian
Thai
Dutch

7. Google Home/Mobile device — The surface to interact with
the Assistant.
The Google Assistant — A conversation between you and
Google that helps you get things done in your world.
Actions on Google — How developers can extend the
assistant (via Assistant apps)

9. The Mobile Voice Study
55% of teens and 41% of adults
Use voice search more than once a day
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/omg-mobile-voice-survey-reveals-teens.html

10. Teens
Adults
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/omg-mobile-voice-survey-reveals-teens.html

11. Actions On Google
Direct and Conversation Actions

12. Turn on the living room lights
Sure thing
Play my dinner party playlist on Spotify
Ok, here you go.
Hi, how can I help?

13. I need an Uber
Sure! I’ll connect you to Uber
Hi Scott, where are you headed?
I’m going to the Ferry Building
Ok, would you like an UberX again?
No, we’ll need an UberXL this time
Ok, Ahmed will arrive in 3 minutes
in a black Toyota Sequoia
Hi, how can I help?

16. How does it work?
The life cycle of voice action

18. Assistant app
{ conversation
api request }
{ conversation
api response }
user input
app
response

19. How to get started?
1. Design 2. Develop 3. Discover

20. 01 Create Persona
02 Think out of Actions
03 Context
04 Speech Errors
05 Think BigDesign

21. 01 Create a Dialogflow agent
02 Create intents & entities
03 Define User says phrases
04 Define Actions & Responses
05 Test it!Develop

22. 01 Create a new cloud project
02 Register your Conversation Action
03 Deploy your actions
04 Confirm your deployment
05 Interact with your Conversation ActionDeploy

23. Conversational Design Intro
Top 3 Design Tips

24. [1] Create a Persona

25. A Persona is conveyed through:
• Tone
• Word and phrase choices
• Functional design
• Style
• Technique
• Voice
And it is based on:
• Your user population
• Their needs
• The imagery &
qualities associated
with your brand

27. Cowabunga, dude!
What flavors do you crave?
The bus is approaching your stop now.
Your trip will take 45 minutes.

28. Buy a pizza
Getting there soon
Purchase a ticket
Arriving soon
Look at your order Review your schedule

29. [2] Think outside the box.
Literally!

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32. DIALOG STRUCTURE

33. [3] In a conversation,
there are no “errors”

34. real life
user
conditions {

35. VUI Tips & Tricks
for better voice user experience

36. GUI : VUI
What’s the difference?

37. “I don’t understand you.”

38. When a so-called “error” occurs
in a conversation, it should be treated
simply as a new turn in the dialog,
only with different conditions.

39. Users have intent

40. Conversation repair for timeouts
USER Ok Google, let me talk to Number Genie.
GOOGLE ASSISTANT Sure, Here's Number Genie.
NUMBER GENIE Welcome to Number Genie! I'm thinking of a number from 0
to 100. What's your first guess?
USER (says nothing)
NUMBER GENIE I didn't hear a number.
USER (silent or muffled)
NUMBER GENIE If you're still there, what's your guess?
Sample Dialogs
What to include:
1. Canonical “Happy path”
2. First time experience
3. Tapered experience
(Return user)
4. Repair

41. Quit game. User gives up and ends the game
USER Hey Google, let me talk to Number Genie.
GOOGLE ASSISTANT Sure, Here's Number Genie.
NUMBER GENIE Welcome to Number Genie! I'm thinking of a number from 0
to 100. What's your first guess?
USER 21-
NUMBER GENIE It’s higher than 21. What’s your next guess?
USER I give up. [LOGIC: catch ending intent]
NUMBER GENIE Sure, I’ll tell you the number anyway. It was 90.
What to include:
1. Canonical “Happy path”
2. First time experience
3. Tapered experience
(Return user)
4. Repair
Sample Dialogs

42. Give users credit
They know how to talk
Avoid force feeding commands.
(such as “to reply to a message,
say ‘reply’” or “to hear that
again, say ‘repeat’”.)
People hardly ever say
nonsense. They just weren’t
parsed correctly. There was a
misalignment in meaning.
They know what they want
There’s no such thing as a query with
no intent. The user wanted to do
something, even if they didn’t say so.
They want to help
Don’t create dead ends when
something doesn’t work.
If you ask for them to say
something again, they will, but
rarely exactly the same way.
Honor that they’re invested in
outcome of a repair attempt.

43. Use the context
Environmental
Where is the user?
What are they doing?
What type of device
are they using?
Situational
What’s their intent?
Where is the user’s
frame of mind?
Temporal
What happened right before?
What’s happening next?
How is the experience
influenced over time?
Behavioral
What do users know
going in?
What data can you use to
enrich the experience
predictively or to cut out
unnecessary steps?

44. Rapid reprompt “What was that?”
“Say that again?”
Reframe the question “What time is this for?” → “Sorry, what time?”
“For when?” → “What time would you like to book this for?”
Ask another way “If it helps, we can do this one piece a time.”
Be ready for questions
about the question
“I have your name and email from your account, so now all I need is
your phone number.”
“You can give me the day, the time, or both.”
Be proactive “I could put you down for 6 for now, does that work?”
“Do you want to finish this later?”
Example strategies to have ready

45. Implementation Details
Let’s get technical, and do a quick demo

47. Well, it’s kind of cold outside, so I'd like
something to warm me up, like a hot
soup, and I want it fast.
I have some chicken, and also canned
tomatoes.

48. Ok Google,
talk to
Personal Chef
Well, it’s kind of
cold outside, so
I’d like...
Sure, here’s
Personal Chef
What are you
in the mood
for?
What protein
would you like
to use?
Speech to Text
NLP
Knowledge Graph
ML Ranking
User Profile
Text to Speech
Speech to Text
Text to Speech
...
Invoke Personal
Chef action
Parse query and
generate
response

49. What about smart displays
Can we get the same amazing experience of Google Assistant on smart displays?!

51. Create and publish your app
Get started by building actions for your app

52. Use existing templates
goo.gl/ggpCr1 goo.gl/h1jaaSgoo.gl/5rVBTH

53. Build a custom app
goo.gl/bhToDa goo.gl/TZsupvgoo.gl/C4AXBr

54. What’s next?
To the infinity and beyond™

56. g.co/dev/ActionsDesign

57. developers.google.com/actions

58. codelabs.developers.google.com

59. goo.gl/PMdr7N

60. Additional Resources
Community Program: developers.google.com/actions
G+ Developer community: g.co/actionsdev
Videos: bit.ly/aog-tips
Dialogflow: dialogflow.com/google-assistant
Twitter: actionsongoogle@
Our mailing list: assistant.google.com/developer

62. Thank you!
Abdelrahman Omran | @Omranic | me@omranic.com