The Google Assistant Actions Builder SDK provides the tools that can be used to extend the functionality of Google Assistant, allowing you to create custom experiences, or conversations, for users of Google Assistant.
The Google Assistant helps millions of users throughout their day, whether it’s on their phone, at home, or on the road.
It enables users to connect to their favourite apps, content, and services using a simple conversation.
Developers can extend the Google Assistant by building Actions that add additional functionality for your own products and services.
Within the Google Assistant Actions Builder SDK a Conversational Action handles requests from Google Assistant and returns responses with audio and visual components.
Conversational Actions can also communicate with external web services with webhooks for added conversational or business logic before returning a response.
To get started, you create an Actions project with the Action Builder and the Actions SDK.
The Actions Builder is a web-based IDE integrated within the Actions console that allows you to develop, test, and deploy actions, all in one place.
For those of you who prefer local IDEs, the Actions SDK provides a file-based representation of an Actions project, along with fulfillment libraries and a command line interface.
Together, Actions Builder and Actions SDK create a seamless, consolidated development experience.
No matter what two you begin with, you can switch between them based on what works best for your workflow.
To see how this all works, let us look at how you will build Conversational Actions with these tools.
Action Builder’s graphical interface lets you visualize the conversational flow, manage natural language understanding training data, and debug with advanced tools.
The Actions SDK lets you take your actions project and continue building it in your local environment, with your favourite source control and continuous integration tools.
Using a CLI, you can synchronize local and remote versions of your Actions projects.
For example, you can use Actions Builder to lay out conversational flows and provide NLU training data to the Actions SDK and a CLI to synchronize the two.
Check out the Google Assistant Action Builder documentation for more requirements and details.
Watch the full video on the Google Assistant Actions Builder SDK with Mandy Chen from Google Developers below: